Ra (kana)

Ra (hiragana: ら; katakana: ラ) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. Both versions are written with two strokes and have origins in the character 良; both characters represent the sound [ɾa] (listen). The Ainu language uses a small katakana ㇻ to represent a final r sound after an a sound (アㇻ ar). The combination of an R-column kana letter with ゜ら゚ in hiragana, and ラ゚ in katakana was introduced to represent [la] in the early 20th century.

Form	Rōmaji	Hiragana	Katakana
Normal r- (ら行 ra-gyō)	Ra, La	ら	ラ
	raa, laa Rā, Lā	らあ, らぁ らー, ら～	ラア, ラァ ラー, ラ～

ra
hiragana katakana
transliteration	ra, la
hiragana origin	良
katakana origin	良
Man'yōgana	良 浪 郎 楽 羅 等
spelling kana	ラジオのラ Rajio no "ra"
unicode	U+3089, U+30E9
braille

Stroke order

Stroke order in writing ら

Stroke order in writing ラ

Stroke order in writing ら

Stroke order in writing ラ

Other communicative representations

Japanese radiotelephony alphabet	Wabun code
ラジオのラ Rajio no "Ra"	▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄

Japanese Navy Signal Flag	Japanese semaphore	Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling)	Braille dots-15 Japanese Braille

• Full Braille representation

ら / ラ in Japanese Braille
ら / ラ ra	らあ / ラー rā	Other kana based on Braille ら
		りゃ / リャ rya	りゃあ / リャー ryā

• Computer encodings

Character information

Preview	ら		ラ		ﾗ		ㇻ		㋶
Unicode name	HIRAGANA LETTER RA		KATAKANA LETTER RA		HALFWIDTH KATAKANA LETTER RA		KATAKANA LETTER SMALL RA		CIRCLED KATAKANA RA
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex	decimal	hex
Unicode	12425	U+3089	12521	U+30E9	65431	U+FF97	12795	U+31FB	13046	U+32F6
UTF-8	227 130 137	E3 82 89	227 131 169	E3 83 A9	239 190 151	EF BE 97	227 135 187	E3 87 BB	227 139 182	E3 8B B6
Numeric character reference	ら	ら	ラ	ラ	ﾗ	ﾗ	ㇻ	ㇻ	㋶	㋶
Shift JIS (plain)[1]	130 231	82 E7	131 137	83 89	215	D7
Shift JIS-2004[2]	130 231	82 E7	131 137	83 89	215	D7	131 248	83 F8
EUC-JP (plain)[3]	164 233	A4 E9	165 233	A5 E9	142 215	8E D7
EUC-JIS-2004[4]	164 233	A4 E9	165 233	A5 E9	142 215	8E D7	166 250	A6 FA
GB 18030[5]	164 233	A4 E9	165 233	A5 E9	132 49 155 49	84 31 9B 31	129 57 189 53	81 39 BD 35
EUC-KR[6] / UHC[7]	170 233	AA E9	171 233	AB E9
Big5 (non-ETEN kana)[8]	198 237	C6 ED	199 163	C7 A3
Big5 (ETEN / HKSCS)[9]	199 112	C7 70	199 229	C7 E5

See also

• Japanese phonology

References

• The Compact Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary, (Andrew N Nelson, John H Haig) Tuttle Publishing, 1999

1. Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-03-08]. "Shift-JIS to Unicode".
2. Project X0213 (2009-05-03). "Shift_JIS-2004 (JIS X 0213:2004 Appendix 1) vs Unicode mapping table".
3. Unicode Consortium; IBM. "EUC-JP-2007". International Components for Unicode.
4. Project X0213 (2009-05-03). "EUC-JIS-2004 (JIS X 0213:2004 Appendix 3) vs Unicode mapping table".
5. Standardization Administration of China (SAC) (2005-11-18). GB 18030-2005: Information Technology—Chinese coded character set.
6. Unicode Consortium; IBM. "IBM-970". International Components for Unicode.
7. Steele, Shawn (2000). "cp949 to Unicode table". Microsoft / Unicode Consortium.
8. Unicode Consortium (2015-12-02) [1994-02-11]. "BIG5 to Unicode table (complete)".
9. van Kesteren, Anne. "big5". Encoding Standard. WHATWG.