Ě

Majuscule and minuscule ě.

The grapheme Ě, ě (E with caron) is used in Czech and Sorbian alphabets, in Pinyin, in Javanese, in Sundanese and in Proto-Slavic notation.

Czech

See also: Czech orthography and Czech phonology

The letter ě is a vestige of Old-Czech palatalization. The originally palatalizing phoneme, yat /ě/ [ʲɛ], became extinct, changing to [ɛ] or [jɛ], but it is preserved as a grapheme.

This letter never appears in the initial position, and its pronunciation depends on the preceding consonant:

• Dě, tě, ně [ɟɛ, cɛ, ɲɛ] is written instead of ďe, ťe, ňe (analogously to di, ti, ni).
• Bě, pě, vě, fě is written instead of bje, pje, vje, fje. Nevertheless, some words (vjezd, "entry, drive-in"; objem, "volume") are written with bje, vje because –je- is part of the etymological root of the word, preceded by the prefix v- or ob-.
• Mě [mɲɛ] is written instead of mňe. For etymological reasons, mně is written in some words (jemný, "soft" -> jemně, "softly").

Serbo-Croatian

The grapheme is sometimes used in Serbo-Croatian to denote a jat (něsam, věra, lěpo, pověst, tělo). It is pronounced in different ways depending on dialect: Ekavian (nesam, vera, lepo, povest, telo), Ikavian (nisam, vira, lipo, povist, tilo) or Ijekavian (nijesam, vjera, lijepo, povijest, tijelo). Historically its use was very widespread, but it gradually lost favour to combined j and e graphemes and it was eventually dropped from the Gaj's Latin alphabet; it is only found in scientific and historically accurate literature.

Chinese

Pinyin uses this ě (e caron), not the e breve (ĕ), to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese.

Javanese

Javanese uses ě (e caron), to indicate pěpět (schwa) ⟨ə⟩.

Sundanese

Same as Javanese, ě (e caron) in Sundanese also indicates pěpět (schwa) ⟨ə⟩.

Encoding

Character information

Preview	Ě		ě
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CARON		LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CARON
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	282	U+011A	283	U+011B
UTF-8	196 154	C4 9A	196 155	C4 9B
Numeric character reference	Ě	Ě	ě	ě
Named character reference	Ě		ě
ISO 8859-2	204	CC	236	EC