Ï (minuscule: ï) is a symbol used in various languages written with the Latin alphabet; the Latin letter I with a diacritic of two dots, which may be read as I with diaeresis. <!-- there is no umlaut here because it is already a front vowel, and so cannot be fronted again in the umlaut process; therefore, it would be very surprising for a reliable source to call this symbol I-umlaut (but perhaps one will eventually be found). "Trema" is just a linguistics name for the two-dots diacritic, so pointless to declare it again. -->
Initially in French and also in Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, Galician, Southern Sami, Welsh, Purépecha, and rarely English, is used when follows another vowel and indicates hiatus in the pronunciation of such a word. It indicates that the two vowels are pronounced in separate syllables, rather than together as a diphthong or digraph. For example, French maïs (; "maize"); without the diaeresis, the is part of the digraph : mais (; "but"). The letter is also used in the same context in Dutch, as in Oekraïne ( *; "Ukraine"), and English naïve ( or ).
In scholarly writing on Turkic languages, is sometimes used to write the close back unrounded vowel , which, in the standard modern Turkish alphabet, is written as the dotless i . The back neutral vowel reconstructed in Proto-Mongolic is sometimes written .
In the transcription of Amazonian languages, is used to represent the high central vowel .
It is also a transliteration of the rune ᛇ.
Computing
The symbol is encoded in Unicode with these codepoints:
See also
- Umlaut (diacritic)
- Yi (Cyrillic) (Ї ї)