Hiragana (平仮名, ひらがな, Japanese pronunciation: [çiɾaɡaꜜna])[note 1] is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana as well as kanji.

It is a phonetic lettering system. The word hiragana literally means “flowing” or “simple” kana (“simple” originally as contrasted with kanji).[1][2][3]

Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems. With few exceptions, each mora in the Japanese language is represented by one character (or one digraph) in each system. This may be either a vowel such as “a” (hiragana あ); a consonant followed by a vowel such as “ka” (か); or “n” (ん), a nasal sonorant which, depending on the context, sounds either like English m, n or ng ([ŋ]) when syllable-final or like the nasal vowels of French, Portuguese or Polish. Because the characters of the kana do not represent single consonants (except in the case of ん “n”), the kana are referred to as syllabic symbols and not alphabetic letters.[4]