İ

İ, or i, called dotted I or i-dot, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Kazakh, Tatar, and Turkish. It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel /i/ except in Kazakh in which it additionally represents the voiced palatal approximant /j/ and the diphthongs /ɪj/ and /əj/. All languages that use it also use its dotless counterpart I, but not the basic Latin letter I.

In computing

The dotted I is encoded into Unicode with the code point U+0130 (U+0069 for the lowercase letter) as part of the Latin Extended-A block.^[1]

Issues

The dotted and dotless I characters have caused issues in computing. Languages like Turkish have four variants of the letter I (as opposed to two in English). This causes problems when, instead of the original mapping of i to I, Turkish maps i to the new İ, and ı to I, frequently breaking software logic.^[2]

Usage in other languages

Both the dotted and dotless I can be used in transcriptions of Rusyn to allow distinguishing between the letters Ы and И, which would otherwise be both transcribed as "y", despite representing different phonemes. Under such transcription the dotted İ would represent the Cyrillic І, and the dotless I would represent either Ы or И, with the other being represented by "Y".^{[citation needed]}

Diacritics

The letter İ can be found with an acute, grave, tilde, ogonek or stroke accent.

Examples:

• i̇́
• i̇̀
• i̇̃
• į̇́
• į̇̃
• 𝼚

See also

• Dotless I, the letter's dotless counterpart

References

1. ^ "Latin Extended-A". Unicode Consortium. Archived 2001-06-03 at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 2023-11-21.
2. ^ Texin, Tex. "Internationalization for Turkish: Dotted and Dotless Letter "I"". www.i18nguy.com. Retrieved 2023-11-21.