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Ə

Ə, or 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 ǝ is used in the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet, but has the capital form majuscule Ǝ, based on a horizontally flipped (or rotated) majuscule E.

The majuscule Ə is encoded in Unicode as U+018F while the minuscule ə as U+0259. The Nigerian majuscule Ǝ is encoded as U+018E and the Nigerian minuscule 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, Ə represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, /æ/. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, minuscule ə is used to represent the mid central vowel (see schwa).

When using 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, ə̄.

See also

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