Sample "Ɩɩ" from various typefaces. Latin iota (majuscule: Ɩ, minuscule: ɩ) is a letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

, based on the

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the Letter (alphabet), letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain lang ...

of the

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

letter

iota Iota (; uppercase: Ι, lowercase: ι; ) is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh. Letters that arose from this letter include the Latin alphabet, Latin I and J, the Cyrillic І (І, і), Yi (Cy ...

(ι). It was formerly used in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

to represent (the vowel in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

"bit"). It was replaced by a small capital I (ɪ) in 1989, but it can still be found in use in some later works. Other variations are used for phonetic transcription: ᵼ ^ι. Ɩ has been adopted as a letter in the alphabets of some

African languages The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: * Niger–Congo or perhaps Atlantic–Congo languages (includes Bantu and non-Bantu, and possibly Mande and others) are spoken in West, Central, Southeast and Southern A ...

, such as Gurunɛ, Kabiyé or Mossi. Its capital form has a hook to distinguish it from capital I. The accented italic form ''ɩ'' is very often indistinguishable from the italic letter small I ''i'' in

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ...

fonts.

References

Latin-script letters Phonetic transcription symbols Vowel letters {{latin-script-stub