Ha (kana)

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ha
hiragana katakana
transliteration	ha, wa
translit. with dakuten	ba
translit. with handakuten	pa
hiragana origin	波
katakana origin	八
Man'yōgana	八 方 芳 房 半 伴 倍 泊 波 婆 破 薄 播 幡 羽 早 者 速 葉 歯
Voiced Man'yōgana	伐 婆 磨 魔
spelling kana	はがきのハ Hagaki no "ha"
unicode	U+306F, U+30CF
braille
Note: This mora was historically pronounced as "pa".

Ha (hiragana: は, katakana: ハ) is one of the Japanese kana, 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 "kon'nichiwa") 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).^[1] This, along with other extended katakana, was developed by Japanese linguists to represent sounds in Ainu not present in standard Japanese katakana.

When used as a particle, は is pronounced as わ [wa]. は is also pronounced as わ in some words (e.g. もののあはれ pronounced as mono no aware).