Dotted and dotless I
Dotted and dotless I are two different letters in the Turkish alphabet. One of them (İ, i) has a dot above it and the other (I, ı) does not. This is true in both the capital and lower case forms of the letters (see the picture).
The dotless I has the /ɯ/ sound, while the dotted İ has the /i/ sound. To show how they are pronounced, here are two examples:
- İstanbul /isˈtanbuɫ/ (starts with an i sound, not an ı).
- Diyarbakır
Dotted And Dotless I Media
Lowercase i and j in Liberation Serif, with tittles in red.
Example of the dotless i on an Irish roadsign
Bí without a tittle and bỉ with a tittle in the Middle Vietnamese dictionary Dictionarium Annamiticum
Mì with a tittle on Vietnamese signage
I with acute and hard dot in Lithuanian and Vietnamese
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/dijaɾˈbakɯɾ/ (the first and last vowels are spelled and pronounced differently)
Some of the other Turkic languages that use the Latin script, like Azerbaijani and Tatar, also use both kinds of I. But in all these languages, including Turkish, the letter j does not have a dotted or dotless form, with a dot only on the lower case character (J, j), just like in the Indo-European languages. However, a dotless j, ȷ, does exist in Unicode.