Ya (kana)

ya
Hiragana Katakana
Transliteration	ya
Hiragana origin	也
Katakana origin	也
Man'yōgana	也 移 夜 楊 耶 野 八 矢 屋
Spelling kana	大和のヤ Yamato no "ya"
Unicode	U+3084, U+30E4
Braille

Ya (hiragana: や, katakana: ヤ) is one of the Japanese kana, each of which represents one mora. The hiragana is written in three strokes, while the katakana is written in two. Both represent [ja]. Their shapes have origins in the character 也.

When small and preceded by an -i kana, this kana represents a palatalization of the preceding consonant sound with the [a] vowel (see yōon).^[1]

や can be used by itself as a grammatical particle to connect words in a nonexhaustive list (see Japanese particles#ya).

Japanese radiotelephony alphabet	Wabun code
大和のヤ Yamato no "Ya"	▄ ▄▄▄ ▄▄▄ ⓘ

Japanese Navy Signal Flag	Japanese semaphore	Japanese manual syllabary (fingerspelling)	Braille dots-34 Japanese Braille

• Full Braille representation

や / ヤ in Japanese Braille
や / ヤ ya	やあ / ヤー yā	ゃ/ャ Yōon*	゛ゃ/゛ャ Dakuten + Yōon*	゜ゃ/゜ャ Handakuten + Yōon*

* The yōon characters ゃ and ャ are encoded in Japanese Braille by prefixing "-a" kana (e.g. Ka, Sa) with a yōon braille indicator, which can be combined with the "Dakuten" or "Handakuten" braille indicators for the appropriate consonant sounds.

• Computer encodings

Look up や, ゃ, ヤ, or ャ in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.