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 standard written 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 , a Small caps, small capital version of the Latin letter b, and the equivale ...
. In the
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
Finno-Ugric transcription (FUT) or the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) 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 Nesto ...
, 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 (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
B.
Use
To avoid the appearance of
homoglyph
In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, character (computing), characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar but may have differing meaning. The designation is also applied to sequence ...
s with a letter, during
Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
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 ne ...
,
Abaza,
Komi,
Tsakhur,
Azerbaijani,
Kurdish
Kurdish may refer to:
*Kurds or Kurdish people
*Kurdish language
** Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji)
**Central Kurdish (Sorani)
**Southern Kurdish
** Laki Kurdish
*Kurdish alphabets
*Kurdistan, the land of the Kurdish people which includes:
**Southern ...
and
Bashkir languages, as well as the
New Turkic alphabet, the
Unified Northern Alphabet
The Unified Northern Alphabet (UNA) () was a set of Latin alphabets created during the Latinisation in the Soviet Union for the Indigenous small-numbered peoples of the North, Siberia and the Far East, "small" languages of northern Russia and u ...
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.
Unicode
The letter has been present since the very first version of the
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
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
See also
*
B (the Latin letter)
*
Ve (Cyrillic)
Ve (В в; italics: ''В'' ''в'') is a letter of the Cyrillic script. It commonly represents the voiced labiodental fricative , like in "vase". It can also represent .
The capital letter Ve Homoglyph, looks the same as the capital ...
, В
*
List of Latin letters
This is a list of letters of the Latin script. The definition of a Latin-script letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode Standard that has a script property of 'Latin' and the general category of 'Letter'. An overview of th ...
*
Small capital letters
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:B, small capital
Phonetic transcription symbols
Latin-script letters