は, in hiragana

Hiragana

is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...

, or ハ in katakana

Katakana

is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...

, is one of the Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 kana

Kana

Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...

, each of which represent one mora. Both represent [ha]). They are also used as a grammatical particle (in such cases, they denote [wa], including in the greeting konnichi wa) and serve as the topic marker of the sentence. は originates from 波 and ハ from 八.

In the Sakhalin dialect of the Ainu language, the katakana ハ can be written as small ㇵ to represent a final h sound after an a sound (アㇵ ah). This, along with other extended katakana, was developed by Japanese linguists to represent sounds in Ainu not present in standard Japanese katakana.

Form	Rōmaji	Hiragana Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...	Katakana Katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji, and in some cases the Latin alphabet . The word katakana means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana scripts are derived from components of more complex kanji. Each kana represents one mora...
Normal h- (は行 ha-gyō)	ha	は	ハ
	haa hā, hah	はあ, はぁ はー	ハア, ハァ ハー
Addition dakuten Dakuten , colloquially ten-ten , is a diacritic sign most often used in the Japanese kana syllabaries to indicate that the consonant of a syllable should be pronounced voiced. Handakuten , colloquially maru , is a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with h to indicate that they should...  b- (ば行 ba-gyō)	ba	ば	バ
	baa bā, bah	ばあ, ばぁ ばー	バア, バァ バー
Addition handakuten p- (ぱ行 pa-gyō)	pa	ぱ	パ
	paa pā, pah	ぱあ, ぱぁ ぱー	パア, パァ パー

Stroke order

See also

• Japanese grammar
  Japanese grammar
  The Japanese language has a regular agglutinative verb morphology, with both productive and fixed elements. In language typology, it has many features divergent from most European languages. Its phrases are exclusively head-final and compound sentences are exclusively left-branching. There are many...