Latin Letter Stretched C

The Latin Letter Stretched C at U+0297 is a phonetic letter shaped like an elongated c, used to write a specific speech sound rather than an ordinary alphabetic c. It is part of the IPA Extensions block and belongs to the lowercase-letter category in Unicode, although its use is specialized and linguistic. Its main role is in phonetic transcription, especially older or extended IPA-style notation for the stretched c sound associated with alveolo-palatal or palatalized click notation in some descriptions of click languages. A linguist might use it in a narrow transcription when documenting contrasts in Khoisan languages or other languages with complex click inventories, where a plain Latin c would be too ambiguous. Today it is uncommon in everyday IPA teaching materials, because many modern transcriptions prefer digraphs, diacritics, or other click symbols depending on the convention being followed. It is most likely to appear in academic articles, grammars, historical phonetic tables, language documentation, and databases that preserve older transcriptions exactly. Because it resembles a distorted or reversed-looking c in some typefaces, it can be mistaken for decorative Latin text by non-specialists. In linguistic data, however, replacing it with a regular c changes the transcription and can make searches or sound inventories inaccurate.