Rise Of The Ogonek

An ogonek is a diacritic mark for some alphabets in Polish, Lithuanian, Navajo, Western Apache, Chiricahua and Tutchone (the last four are indigenous languages of the native Americans) which is used to indicate nasalisation. It looks like a little hook under a letter, like so : ę.

I encountered it back when I was writing my thesis, when I had to cite a Polish professor named Jan Węglarz and had trouble rendering the ogonek with LaTeX. It turns out that you need the following package:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Once you have that, you can use \k{} to add an ogonek to the letter in the curly braces, say for example:

Jan W\k{e}glarz

The above produces:



Ta da! An ogonek!

Ogoneks should not be confused with cedillas, which is a hook that goes the other way (ç). For more information on ogoneks, check out the Wikipedia entry.