Heng is a letter of the Latin alphabet, originating as a typographic ligature of h and ŋ. It is used for a voiceless y-like sound, such as in Dania transcription of the Danish language. Heng was used word-finally in early transcriptions of Mayan languages, where it may have represented a uvular fricative. It is sometimes used to write Judeo-Tat. Heng has been occasionally used by phonologists to represent a jocular phoneme in English, which includes both and as its allophones, to illustrate the limited usefulness of minimal pairs to distinguish phonemes. and are separate phonemes in English, even though no minimal pair for them exists due to their complementary distribution. Heng is also used in Bantu linguistics to indicate a voiced alveolar lateral fricative. Both and are encoded in Unicode block Latin Extended-D; they were added with Unicode version 5.1 in April 2008.

Transcription

A variant form,, is encoded as part of the IPA Extensions Block. It is used to represent the voiceless palatal-velar fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet. is used as a superscript IPA letter.

Teuthonista

The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system uses both heng and.