Hiragana Small Kana - Alt Codes & Unicode

Japanese hiragana comes in full-size and small forms, and the small ones are not a typographic variation — they are separate characters that change how a syllable is read. The small vowels ぁ, ぃ, ぅ, ぇ and ぉ, the small ya, yu and yo (ゃ, ゅ, ょ), the small tsu (っ) and the rare small wa (ゎ) each do a specific job, and substituting a full-size kana for a small one produces a different word.

The small ya, yu and yo build the contracted sounds called yōon. A kana from the i-row combines with one of them to make a single syllable: き plus ゃ gives きゃ, read kya rather than ki-ya. This is how Japanese writes sounds like sha, chu and ryo. The size difference is the only thing distinguishing きゃ from きや, and they are different words — the first is one syllable, the second is two.

The small tsu, っ, is the sokuon, and it marks a doubled consonant with a brief pause. It is never pronounced as tsu. きて means come, and きって means stamp; まて is wait, まって is the te-form of the same verb. In romanisation it appears as the doubled consonant of kitte and matte. Getting the size wrong here changes the word entirely, and because っ is extremely common in ordinary vocabulary, this is the small kana most worth getting right.

The small vowels are used differently. In native Japanese words they are rare, but they are essential for writing foreign loanwords and non-standard sounds, mostly in katakana: フィ for fi, ウェ for we, ティ for ti. In hiragana they appear in casual writing to represent drawn-out or clipped speech, so you will see them in manga, advertising and informal text more than in formal prose. The small wa, ゎ, is genuinely rare and mostly historical.

The practical point about typing is that you almost never enter these characters directly. Japanese input is done through an IME, where you type romaji and the software produces the correct kana automatically: typing kya gives きゃ with the small ya, and typing kitte gives きって with the small tsu. If you do need a small kana on its own, most IMEs accept an x or l prefix — xya or lya gives ゃ, and xtsu or ltu gives っ. On mobile Japanese keyboards there is a dedicated small-kana toggle key, usually marked 小 or with a large-and-small character pair, that converts the last kana you typed. Reaching for copy and paste, as this table allows, is generally only worth it when you are editing text outside a Japanese input context.