Gemination - Writing

Writing

In written language, consonant length is often indicated by writing a consonant twice ("ss", "kk", "pp", and so forth), but can also be indicated with a special symbol, such as the shadda in Arabic, or sokuon in Japanese. Estonian uses 'b', 'd', 'g' for short consonants, and 'p', 't', 'k' and 'pp', 'tt', 'kk' are used for long consonants.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, long consonants are normally written using the triangular colon ː, e.g., penne (a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms).

• Catalan uses the raised dot (called an "interpunct") to distinguish a geminated l from a palatal ll.
  Thus, paral·lel ("parallel") and Llull .

• In Hungarian, digraphs (e.g. sz /s/) are geminated by doubling the first letter only, thus ssz (rather than szsz) /sː/. (For a complete list of Hungarian digraphs, see Hungarian orthography.)

• The only digraph in Ganda, ny /ɲ/ is doubled in the same way: nny /ɲː/.

• In Italian, geminated instances of the sound (represented by the letter Q) are always indicated by writing cq, except in the word soqquadro, where the letter Q is doubled.

• In Swedish and Norwegian, the general rule is that a geminated consonant is written double, unless succeeded by another consonant. Hence hall ("hall"), but halt ("Halt!"). In Swedish, this does not apply to morphological changes (so kall, "cold" and kallt, "coldly" or compounds . The exception are some words ending in -m, thus hem and stam, but lamm, with a long /a/), as well as adjectives in -nn, so tunn, "thin" but tunt, "thinly".