Wa (kana)

Wa (hiragana: わ, katakana: ワ) is one of the Japanese kana, which each represent one mora. It represents [wa] and has origins in the character 和. There is also a small ゎ/ヮ, that is used to write the morae /kwa/ and /gwa/ (くゎ, ぐゎ), which are almost obsolete in contemporary standard Japanese but still exist in the Ryukyuan languages. A few loanwords such as shīkwāsā (シークヮーサー; from Okinawan language) and Musica Antiqua Köln (ムジカ・アンティクヮ・ケルン, Mujika Antikwa Kerun; a German early music group) contain this kana in Japanese. Katakana ワ is also sometimes written with dakuten, ヷ, to represent a /va/ sound in foreign words; however, most IMEs lack a convenient way to write this. It is far more common to represent the /va/ sound with the digraph ヴァ.

The kana は (ha) is read as "wa" when it represents a particle.

The katakana va (ヷ), which is a wa with a dakuten ("voiced mark"), along with vu (ヴ), was first used by the educator Fukuzawa Yukichi for transcribing English in 1860 in his English-Japanese dictionary, which featured such entries as Heaven(ヒーヴヌ) (Hīvunu), Venus(ヴェヌス) (Venusu), River(リーヷル) (Rīvaru), etc. It is intended to represent a voiced labiodental fricative [v] in foreign languages, but the actual pronunciation by Japanese speakers may be closer to a voiced bilabial fricative [β] (see Japanese phonology § Voiced bilabial fricative).