Ñ

Ñ (minuscule: ñ) (Spanish: eñe [ˈeɲe] ) is a letter of the extended Latin alphabet, formed by placing a tilde (also referred to as a virgulilla in Spanish, in order to differentiate it from other diacritics, which are also called tildes) on top of an upper- or lower-case ⟨n⟩. The origin dates back to medieval Spanish, when the Latin digraph ⟨nn⟩ began to be abbreviated using a single ⟨n⟩ with a roughly wavy line above it, and it eventually became part of the Spanish alphabet in the eighteenth century, when it was first formally defined. Since then, it has been adopted by other languages, such as Aragonese, Asturian, Basque, Chavacano, several Philippine languages (especially Filipino and the Bisayan group), Chamorro, Galician, Guarani, Quechua, Mapudungun, Mandinka, Papiamento, and Tetun. It also appears in the Latin transliteration of Tocharian and many Indian languages, where it represents [ɲ] or [nʲ] (similar to the ⟨ny⟩ in canyon). Additionally, it was adopted in Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, ALA-LC romanization for Turkic languages, the Common Turkic Alphabet, Nauruan, and romanized Quenya, where it represents the phoneme [ŋ] (like the ⟨ng⟩ in wing). It has also been adopted in both Breton and Rohingya, where it indicates the nasalization of the preceding vowel. Unlike many other letters that use diacritics (such as ⟨ü⟩ in Catalan and Spanish and ⟨ç⟩ in Catalan), ⟨ñ⟩ in Spanish, Galician, Basque, Asturian, Leonese, Guarani and Filipino is considered a letter in its own right, has its own name (Spanish: eñe), and its own place in the alphabet (after ⟨n⟩). Its alphabetical independence is similar to the Germanic ⟨w⟩, which came from a doubled ⟨v⟩.