Ï

I with Diaeresis
Ï ï
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
Sound values
In UnicodeU+00CF, U+00EF
History
Development
IE
  • Ï ï

Ï, lowercase 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 u with diaeresis or I with trema.

Initially in French and also in Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, Galician, Southern Sami, Welsh, and occasionally English, ï is used when i 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 (IPA: [ma.is] ; "maize"); without the diaeresis, the i is part of the digraph ai: mais (IPA: [] ; "but"). The letter is also used in the same context in Dutch, as in Oekraïne (pronounced [ukraːˈ(j)inə] *and not [uˈkrɑinə]; "Ukraine"), and English naïve (/nɑːˈv/ nah-EEV or /nˈv/ ny-EEV).

In scholarly writing on Turkic languages, ï is sometimes used to write the close back unrounded vowel /ɯ/, which, in the standard modern Turkish alphabet, is written as the dotless i ı. The back neutral vowel reconstructed in Proto-Mongolic is sometimes written ï.

In the transcription of Amazonian languages, ï is used to represent the high central vowel [ɨ].

It is also a transliteration of the rune .