Two distinct versions of the letter I, dotted and dotless, are used in the Turkish alphabet, which is a variant of the Latin alphabet. Dotted and dotless "i" are used in the Turkish, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar and Tatar languages.

I ı is the letter which describes the close back unrounded vowel sound (). Neither the upper or lower case versions have a dot.

İ i describes the variant close front unrounded vowel sound (). Both the upper and lower case versions have a dot.

Example: İstanbul (starts with an i sound, not an ı).

In computing

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In Unicode is a lower case letter dotless i (ı). U+0130 (İ) is capital i with dot. IS0-8859-9 has them at positions 0xDD and 0xFD respectively. In normal typography, when lower case i's is combined with other diacritics, the dot is generally removed before the diacritic is added; however, Unicode still lists the equivalent combining sequences as including the dotted i, since logically it is the normal dotted i character that is being modified.

Software handling Unicode uppercasing and lowercasing will generally change ı to I and İ to i but unless it is specifically set up for Turkish it will change I to i and i to I rather than I to ı and i to İ. This means that the effect of uppercasing followed by lowercasing can be different from the effect of just lowercasing for texts that contain these characters.

In the Microsoft Windows SDK, beginning with Windows Vista, several relevant functions have a NORM_LINGUISTIC_CASING flag, to indicate that for Turkish and Azeri locales, I should map to ı and i to İ.

In the LaTeX typesetting language the dotless i can be written with the backslash-i command: \i.

See also

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• Tittle

References

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• http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf
• Tex Texin, Internationalization for Turkish: Dotted and Dotless Letter "I", accessed 15 Nov 2005

Uncommon Latin letters | Vowel letters

I sin punto | İ | İ | 带点与不带点I