Ə

unicode|Ə, or unicode|ə, is a letter derived from the Latin alphabet. Both glyphs of the majuscule and minuscule forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e; a similar letter with identical minuscule unicode|ǝ is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule unicode|Ǝ, based on a horizontally flipped (or rotated) majuscule E.

The majuscule unicode|Ə is encoded in Unicode as U+018F while the minuscule unicode|ə as U+0259. The Nigerian majuscule unicode|Ǝ is encoded as U+018E and the Nigerian minuscule unicode|ǝ as U+01DD.

The letter was used in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, for example, in Janalif for the Tatar language in 1920s-1930s.

In the Latin Azerbaijani and Chechen alphabets, unicode|Ə represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, IPA|/æ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, minuscule unicode|ə is used to represent the mid central vowel (see schwa).

When using unicode|ə, the Azerbaijani language has problems with the Turkish encoding, so sometimes ä has been used instead, as in the Tatar language and Turkmen language.

In the Latin transliteration of Avestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron, " _ae. əUnicode|̄".

ee also

*Schwa
*Schwa (Cyrillic)
*Existential quantification, uses the ∃ symbol