Dakuten (濁点), colloquially ten-ten ("dot dot"), is a diacritic sign most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced. Handakuten (半濁点), colloquially maru ("circle"), is a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with h to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with ^*. In informal writing, particularly manga, it is occasionally used on vowels to indicate a shocked or strangled articulation.

Glyphs

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The dakuten resembles a quotation mark, while the handakuten is a small circle, similar to a degree sign, both placed at the top right corner of a kana character:

□゛ dakuten (゛)

□゜ handakuten (゜)

The glyphs are identical in the hiragana and katakana scripts. The combining characters are rarely used in full-width Japanese characters, as Unicode and all common multibyte Japanese encodings provide precomposed glyphs for all possible dakuten and handakuten character combinations in the standard hiragana and katakana ranges. However, combining characters are required in half-width katakana, which does not provide any precomposed characters in order to fit within a single byte.

Due to the similarity of dakuten and quotation marks ("), quotes in written Japanese often use corner brackets (「」) instead.

Phonetic shifts

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The following table summarizes the phonetic shifts caused by the dakuten and handakuten. Literally, syllables with dakuten are "muddy sounds" (濁音 dakuon), while those without are "clear sounds" (清音 seion), but the handakuten (lit. "half-muddy mark") does not follow this pattern.

none	dakuten	handakuten
か ka	が ga
さ sa	ざ za
た ta	だ da
は ha	ば ba	ぱ pa

Handakuten on ka, ki, ku, ke, ko are not used in normal Japanese writing, but may be used by linguists and in dictionaries to represent the sound of ng in singing (IPA: ), which is an allophone of in some dialects of Japanese. This is called bidakuon (鼻濁音), "nasal muddy sound". (See: Japanese phonology.)

See hiragana for a complete table.

Kana iteration marks

The dakuten can also be added to hiragana and katakana iteration marks, indicating that the previous kana is repeated with voicing:

	none	dakuten
hiragana	ゝ	ゞ
katakana	ヽ	ヾ

Both signs are relatively rare, but can occasionally be found in personal names such as Misuzu (みすゞ). In these cases the pronunciation is identical to writing the kana out in full. There is also a longer mark called ku no jiten, which is only used in vertical writing which repeats multiple kana, and this also can have a dakuten added.

The V sound

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In katakana only, the dakuten may also be added to the character ウ u and a small vowel character to create a /v/ sound, as in ヴァ va. As "V" does not exist in Japanese, this usage applies only to some modern loanwords and remains relatively uncommon, and e.g. Venus is typically transliterated as ビーナス biinasu instead of ヴィーナス viinasu. Many Japanese, however, would pronounce both the same, with a /b/ sound, and may or may not recognize them as representing the same word.

An even less common method is to add dakuten to the w- series, reviving the now defunct characters for /wi/ (ヰ) and /we/ (ヱ). /vu/ is represented by using /u/, as above; /wo/ becomes /vo/ despite its W normally being silent. Precomposed characters exist for this method as well (/va/ ヷ /vi/ ヸ /vu/ ヴ /ve/ ヹ /vo/ ヺ), although most IMEs do not have a convenient way to enter them.

Mnemonic Device

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It's much easier for non-native speakers to remember the phonetic shift through the use of a mnemonic device starting with the original sound and ending with the changed sound. An example would be:

• Keg
• Soyuz
• Timid
• Hub
• Hop (especially helpful since both "o" and the handakuten are circles)

kana | Japanese phonology

Japanese terms

Dakuten | 濁点