I with crossbars - uppercase and lowercase

Small capital In typography, small caps (short for small capitals) are characters typeset with glyphs that resemble uppercase letters but reduced in height and weight close to the surrounding lowercase letters or text figures. Small caps are used in running ...

I is an additional letter of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

similar in its dimensions to the Latin letter " I" but with a shape based on , its capital form. Although is usually an

allograph In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious exa ...

of the Latin letter I i, it is considered as an additional letter in the

African reference alphabet The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organi ...

and has been used as such in some publications in the

Kulango languages The Kulango or Kulango–Lorhon languages are spoken principally in Ivory Coast. They were once classified as part of an expanded Gur (Voltaic) family and are now part of the Savannas proposal. The languages distinguished by ''Ethnologue'' are: ...

Côte d'Ivoire Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire and officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital city of Yamoussoukro is located in the centre of the country, while its largest city and ...

in the 1990s. 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 ...

, the lowercase small capital I is used as the symbol for the

near-close near-front unrounded vowel The near-close near-front unrounded vowel, or near-high near-front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , the small capital ...

, like the letter ''i'' in the word ''"fit"''.

Encoding

Until Unicode 8.0.0 (2015), uppercase I with crossbars was not yet encoded. To fill out the gap, a number of fonts contained a non-standard glyph, or used a code point from

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

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 ...

. But this oddity has gone since the 9.0 version of Unicode (2016). *

: ** Capital Ɪ: since Unicode 9.0.0 (2016) ** Lowercase ɪ: since Unicode 1.0 *

ISO 6438 ISO 6438:1983, ''Documentation — African coded character set for bibliographic information interchange'', is an ISO standard for an 8-bit character encoding for African languages. Developed separately from the African reference alphabet but appa ...

: ** Capital Ɪ: ''missing'' ** Lowercase ɪ: 0xBF

Glyphs

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 ( ...

(and some other)

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s the letter usually has ''two'' crossbars, which distinguishes it from the lowercase (

dotless I I, or ı, called dotless i, is a letter used in the Latin-script alphabets of Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Gagauz, Kazakh, Tatar and Turkish. It commonly represents the close back unrounded vowel , except in Kazakh where it represents the ...

), otherwise

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 ...

ical, but whose upper serif has another configuration.

Bibliography

* Pascal Boyeldieu, Stefan Elders, Gudrun Miehe. 2008. ''Grammaire koulango (parler de Bouna, Côte d’Ivoire)''. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. . * Diocèse de Bondoukou Nassian. 1992. ''Syllabaire koulango: réservé aux élèves des cours bibliques en Koulango (Inspiré par les syllabaires de la Société Internationale de Linguistique, collection: « Je lis ma langue », Nouvelles Éditions Africaines / EDICEF)''. Nassian: Diocèse de Bondoukou. * Ahoua, F., & Adouakou, S. (2009). ''Parlons agni indénié. Côte d’Ivoire.'' Paris: L’Harmattan. * UNESCO. 1980. ''Alphabet africain de référence''. Paris: UNESCO, Secteur de la Culture et de la Communication. {{DEFAULTSORT:I Small Caps Phonetic transcription symbols Latin-script letters Vowel letters