İ, or i, called dotted I or i-dot, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz alphabet, Kazakh alphabets, Tatar alphabet, and Turkish alphabet. It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel except in Kazakh in which it additionally represents the voiced palatal approximant and the diphthongs and . All languages that use it also use its Dotless 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.
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.
Usage in other languages
Both the dotted and dotless I can be used in transcriptions of
Rusyn language 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".
See also
