Palochka is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

. This letter usually has only a capital form, which is also used in lowercase text. The capital form of Palochka often looks like

Homoglyph

In typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more characters, or glyphs, with shapes that either appear identical or cannot be differentiated by quick visual inspection. This designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties....

 the capital form of the Cyrillic letter Dotted I (І і), the capital form of the Latin letter I

I

I is the ninth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:In Semitic, the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative in Egyptian, but was reassigned to by Semites, because their word for "arm" began with that sound...

 (I i), and the lowercase form of the Latin letter L

L

Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...

 (L l),

The letter was introduced during the Cyrillization

Cyrillization

A Cyrillization is a system for rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than the Cyrillic alphabet into a Cyrillic alphabet. A Cyrillization scheme needs to be applied, for example, to transcribe names of German, Chinese, or American people and places for use in...

 of the Caucasian languages in the late 1930s. In order to keep new orthography compatible with Russian typewriter

Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...

s many new alphabets did not contain any letters distinct from the ones of the Russian alphabet

Russian alphabet

The Russian alphabet is a form of the Cyrillic script, developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

 (sounds absent in Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations). Palochka was the only exception, and in practice while typewriting the digit 1 was used instead. This practice still is common, because Palochka is not present in standard keyboard layouts or common fonts, and so cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems.

In the alphabets of the Caucasian languages

Languages of the Caucasus

The languages of the Caucasus are a large and extremely varied array of languages spoken by more than ten million people in and around the Caucasus Mountains, which lie between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea....

 Abaza

Abaza language

The Abaza language is a language of the Caucasus mountains in the Russian Karachay-Cherkess Republic by the Abazins...

, Adyghe

Adyghe language

Adyghe language , also known as West Circassian , is one of the two official languages of the Republic of Adygea in the Russian Federation, the other being Russian. It is spoken by various tribes of the Adyghe people: Abzekh, Adamey, Bzhedugh; Hatukuay, Kemirgoy, Makhosh; Natekuay, Shapsigh; Zhane,...

, Avar

Avar language

The modern Avar language belongs to the Avar–Andic group of the Northeast Caucasian language family....

, Chechen

Chechen language

The Chechen language is spoken by more than 1.5 million people, mostly in Chechnya and by Chechen people elsewhere. It is a member of the Northeast Caucasian languages.-Classification:...

, Dargwa, Ingush

Ingush language

Ingush is a language spoken by about 413,000 people , known as the Ingush, across a region covering Ingushetia, Chechnya, Kazakhstan and Russia. In Ingush, the language is called ГІалгІай Ğalğaj .-Classification:...

, Kabardian

Kabardian language

The Kabardian language, also known as East Circassian , is a Northwest Caucasian language, closely related to the Adyghe language. It is spoken mainly in the Russian republics of Kabardino-Balkaria and Karachay-Cherkessia and in Turkey and the Middle East...

, Lak

Lak language

The Lak language is a Northeast Caucasian language forming its own branch within this family. It is the language of the Lak people from the Russian autonomous republic of Dagestan, where it is one of six standardized languages...

, Lezgian

Lezgi language

Lezgian, also called Lezgi or Lezgin, is a language that belongs to the Lezgic languages. It is spoken by the Lezgins, who live in southern Dagestan and northern Azerbaijan. Lezgian is a literary language and an official language of Dagestan. It is classified as "vulnerable" by UNESCO's Atlas of...

 and Tabassaran, Palochka has no independent phonetic value, but signals that the preceding consonant is an ejective

Ejective consonant

In phonetics, ejective consonants are voiceless consonants that are pronounced with simultaneous closure of the glottis. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated or tenuis consonants...

. (An exception is the Abkhaz language

Abkhaz language

Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken mainly by the Abkhaz people. It is the official language of Abkhazia where around 100,000 people speak it. Furthermore, it is spoken by thousands of members of the Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey, Georgia's autonomous republic of Adjara, Syria, Jordan...

, which does not use palochka for rendering ejectives.)

Example from Avar: [kʼaˈɬaze], "to speak"

In Adyghe, Chechen, Ingush and Kabardian, Palochka also functions as the glottal stop

Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

 /ʔ/.

Example from Kabardian: [jaɬaˈʔʷaːɕ], "he asked her for something"

In Chechen

Chechen language

The Chechen language is spoken by more than 1.5 million people, mostly in Chechnya and by Chechen people elsewhere. It is a member of the Northeast Caucasian languages.-Classification:...

, Palochka represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative

Voiced pharyngeal fricative

The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents it is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\....

 /ʕ/.

Computing codes

character	Ӏ		ӏ
Unicode name	CYRILLIC LETTER PALOCHKA		CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER PALOCHKA
character encoding	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...	1216	04C0	1231	04CF
UTF-8 UTF-8 UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...	211 128	D3 80	211 143	D3 8F
Numeric character reference Numeric character reference A numeric character reference is a common markup construct used in SGML and other SGML-related markup languages such as HTML and XML. It consists of a short sequence of characters that, in turn, represent a single character from the Universal Character Set of Unicode...	Ӏ	Ӏ	ӏ	ӏ

The lowercase form of palochka was added to Unicode 5.0 in July 2006.