Modifier Letter Begin High Tone

Modifier Letter Begin High Tone at U+02F9 marks the start of a stretch of speech pronounced with high pitch in phonetic or tonal transcription. It is a printable spacing modifier letter in the Spacing Modifier Letters block, so it occupies its own character position rather than attaching above or below another letter. Its main real-world use is in linguistic work on tone languages, where pitch level or pitch movement is being recorded across a syllable, word, or phrase. A transcription may place it before the portion that begins high, especially in systems that mark tone spans rather than putting a separate tone mark on every vowel. You are most likely to encounter it in phonetics papers, language documentation, dictionaries, and archived fieldwork materials for languages where high tone contrasts with mid, low, rising, or falling tones. It can also appear when digitizing older phonetic notation that used corner-like tone delimiters to show where a pitch register begins. Because it looks like a raised left corner bracket, it can be mistaken for punctuation in plain text. Its meaning is not ordinary quotation or grouping; in linguistic notation it specifically signals tonal information.