Latin Capital Letter A with Ogonek

The Latin Capital Letter A with Ogonek at U+0104 is an uppercase Latin letter A carrying a small hook-shaped ogonek below it, used as a distinct alphabetic character rather than a decorated A. It belongs to the Latin Extended-A block and appears in languages whose orthographies mark particular vowel qualities with the ogonek. Its most familiar use is in Polish, where Ą is the uppercase form of ą and represents a nasal vowel, often pronounced with a following nasal element depending on context. It occurs in ordinary words and names, such as Ącki in surnames or sentence-initial forms of words containing ą, and it has its own place in Polish alphabetical order after A. The letter is also used in Lithuanian, where ą historically marked a nasal vowel but in modern pronunciation usually represents a long a sound. It appears in common grammatical forms and words such as Ąžuolas, a name and the word for “oak,” so replacing it with plain A can change spelling and disrupt dictionary lookup. In Indigenous-language orthographies and scholarly transliteration, ogonek vowels may mark nasalization as well, so Ą can appear in capitalized names, headings, or linguistic examples. It should not be confused with A plus a comma or cedilla-like mark; the ogonek is part of the letter in these writing systems.