The saltillo is a phoneme in many American languages besides Nahuatl, which means that its presence or absence can change the meaning of a word. However, there is no saltillo in standard Spanish, so the sound is often imperceptible to Spanish speakers, and Spanish writers usually did not write it when transcribing Mexican languages. This meant that, for example, Nahuatl [ˈtɬeko] "in a fire" and [ˈtɬeʔko] "he ascends" were both written tleco.

Saltillo can also refer to a straight apostrophe-like symbol, sometimes described as a dotless exclamation point, that is sometimes used to represent the sound. This letter corresponds to two code points in Unicode 5.1 (released 4 April 2008), namely (Ꞌ, ꞌ U+A78B LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SALTILLO and U+A78C LATIN SMALL LETTER SALTILLO.) It has in the past often been provisionally substituted for by such letters as ʼ U+02BC, MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.

See also

• Glottal stop (letter)
• Hamza
• Okina

External links

• Definition of saltillo