B, ʙ (''small capital B'') is an extended Latin letter used as the lowercase B in a number of alphabets during romanization. It is also used in the

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

to denote a

voiced bilabial trill The voiced bilabial trill is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B\. Features Features of the voiced ...

. In the

Uralic Phonetic Alphabet The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) or Finno-Ugric transcription system is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nes ...

, it denotes a semi-voiced bilabial stop consonant. It was also used in the writing of medieval Icelandic to denote

geminated In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...

Use

To avoid the appearance of homoglyphs with a letter, during

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

latinisation, the alphabets of the

Sami Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ...

, Abaza, Komi, Tsakhur, Azerbaijani,

Kurdish Kurdish may refer to: *Kurds or Kurdish people *Kurdish languages *Kurdish alphabets *Kurdistan, the land of the Kurdish people which includes: **Southern Kurdistan **Eastern Kurdistan **Northern Kurdistan **Western Kurdistan See also * Kurd (dis ...

and Bashkir languages, as well as the New Turkic alphabet, the

Unified Northern Alphabet The Unified Northern Alphabet (UNA) (russian: Единый северный алфавит) was created during the Latinisation in the Soviet Union for the "small" languages of the North. Systematic work on the development of writing in the lan ...

and the project of reform of the Udmurt script used ʙ as the lowercase form of the letter B. The letter also was used in the Adyghe and Hebrew-Tajik alphabets, although they were absent. In the Middle Ages, the author of the First Icelandic Grammatical Treatise used 'ʙ' to transcribe geminate B. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, / ʙ / represents a voiced bilabial trill. The symbol was adopted following the 1989 Kiel Convention. In the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, ‹ʙ› represents a semi-voiced bilabial stop consonant, denoted ̥᪽or ̥with the International Phonetic Alphabet, as opposed to ‹b› representing a voiced bilabial stop consonant. File:Sami alphabet 1933.jpg, The Sami alphabet in 1933 File:Abaza latin alphabet.jpg, Abaza alphabet of the 1930s File:Komi latin alphabet.PNG, Komi Alphabet in 1934 File:Tsakhur alphabet (1934).JPG File:Unified Northern Alphabet.jpg File:Adyghe latin alphabet (1927).svg

Unicode

The letter has been present since the very first version of the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

standard and is located in the

IPA Extensions IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs ...

block as code point .

Computing codes

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:B, small capital Phonetic transcription symbols Latin-script letters