Soft-dotted I (Cyrillic)

Soft-dotted I (Cyrillic)

The soft-dotted i (І і; italics: І і ), also called decimal i, is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

It commonly represents the close front unrounded vowel /i/, like the pronunciation of ⟨i⟩ in "machine".

It is used in the orthographies of the Belarusian, Kazakh, Khakas, Komi, Rusyn and Ukrainian languages, where it is the equivalent of the Cyrillic letter i (И и) as used in Russian and other languages. (Ukrainian і is therefore Russian и, while Ukrainian uses и for Russian ы. Belarusian meanwhile uses only і and ы, excluding и entirely.)

Just like the Latin letters I/i (and J/j), the dot above the letter only appears in its lowercase form, and only if that letter is not combined with a diacritic above it (notably the diaeresis used in Ukrainian to note the letter yi of its alphabet, and the macron). But even in that case (and as with the Latin letters i and j), this dot has not always been rendered in historic texts where the lowercase form was present without any other diacritic, and some modern texts and font styles may still discard this "soft" dot on the lowercase letter, because it is necessary for the readability of the text only for cursive styles.