The palatal hook (◌̡) is a type of hook diacritic formerly used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent palatalized consonants.^[1] It is a small, leftwards-facing hook joined to the bottom-right side of a letter, and is distinguished from various other hooks indicating retroflexion, etc. Theoretically, it could be used on all IPA consonant letters except for those for palatal consonants, but it is not attested on all of the IPA letters of its era.^[2] It was withdrawn by the IPA in 1989, in favour of a superscript j following the consonant (i.e., ⟨ƫ⟩ becomes ⟨tʲ⟩).^[1]

The IPA recommended that esh ⟨ʃ⟩ and ezh ⟨ʒ⟩ not use the palatal hook, but instead get special curled symbols: ⟨ʆ⟩ and ⟨ʓ⟩. However, versions with the hook have also been used and are supported by Unicode.

Palatal hooks are also used for Lithuanian dialectology in the Lithuanian Phonetic Transcription System (or Lithuanian Phonetic Alphabet), including the unusual letter ꞔ, which is not a c plus palatal hook but a graphic variant of ᶃ.^[3]

The last IPA chart to support the palatal hook was that of 1979. The following consonants appear on that chart. Those attested with palatal hook are bolded. Palatal and palatalized letters are enclosed in brackets; they are redundant with the hook.^[2]

* ⟨ʍ⟩ is used for English, does not occur palatalized

Other consonants on the chart:

ᵵ, ɫ̡ (etc.): should be typeset with the hook letter and an overstruck tilde diacritic

[ɕ] [ʑ], [ʆ], [ʓ]

ɼ [used for Czech, does not occur palatalized]

ɺ

ɧ [used for Swedish, does not occur palatalized]

ʦ̡ ʧ̡ ʤ̡ (ʣ̡ is implied but not listed)

Unicode includes a combining character for the palatal hook, but it is not canonically equivalent to the precomposed characters, which should be used instead.^[2]