Palochka

The palochka (&#x04C0; &#x04CF;; italic: ) is a letter in the Cyrillic script. The letter is usually caseless. It was introduced in the late 1930s as the Hindu-Arabic digit '1', and on Cyrillic keyboards, it is usually typeset as the Roman numeral 'I'. Unicode currently supports both caseless/capital palochka at U+04C0 and a rarer lower-case palochka at U+04CF. The palochka marks glottal(ized) and pharyngeal(ized) consonants.

Form
The letter looks similar to the digit 1. Its uppercase form resembles the Latin Letter I (I i) in uppercase form, while its lowercase form resembles the Latin letter L (L l) in lowercase form.

History
The Cyrillic palochka was derived directly from the Arabic letter alif (ا). In the early days of the Soviet Union, many of the non-Russian Cyrillic alphabets contained only letters found in the Russian alphabet to keep them compatible with Russian typewriters. Sounds absent from Russian were marked with digraphs and other letter combinations. The palochka was the only exception because the numerical digit 1 was used instead of the letter. In fact, on many Russian typewriters, the character looked not like the digit 1 but like the Roman numeral with serifs. That is still common because the palochka is not present in most standard keyboard layouts (and, for some of them, not even the soft-dotted ) or common fonts and so it cannot be easily entered or reliably displayed on many computer systems. For example, as of 2024, even the official site of the People's Assembly of the Republic of Ingushetia uses the digit 1 instead of the palochka.

Usage
In the alphabets of Abaza, Avar, Chechen, Dargwa, Ingush, Lak, Lezgian, Tabassaran, and Tsakhur, it is a modifier letter which signals the preceding consonant as an ejective or pharyngeal consonant; this letter has no phonetic value on its own.

In Adyghe, the palochka by itself represents a glottal stop (like the tt in GA button).
 * Example from Kabardian Adyghe dialect:, "he asked her for something"

In Avar, it represents an ejective consonant.
 * Example from Avar:, "to speak"

In Chechen, the palochka makes a preceding stop or affricate ejective if voiceless, or pharyngealized if voiced, but also represents the voiced pharyngeal fricative (like the ayn in Arabic) when it does not follow a stop or affricate. As an exception, in the digraph ⟨хӀ⟩, it produces the voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Ingush is similar.
 * Examples from Chechen:, "girl" and жӀаьла [], "shark”

Exceptionally among the Caucasian languages, Abkhaz does not use the palochka, but instead uses a series of special letters to distinguish ejective and non-ejective (aspirated) consonants.

Computing codes

 * The lowercase form of the palochka was added to Unicode 5.0 in July 2006.