Ě

The grapheme Ě, ě (E with caron) is used in Czech, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian alphabets.

Czech

The letter ě is a vestige of Old-Czech palatalization. The originally palatalizing phoneme /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. But in some words (vjezd, entry, drive-in, objem, volume), bje, vje is written 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).

Croatian

The grapheme is also use in Croatian to denote a jat (něsam, věra, lěpo, pověst, tělo...) and could be pronounce depending on specific reflex : Ekavian (nesam, vera, lepo, povest, telo...), Ikavian (nisam, vira, lipo, povist, tilo...), Jekavian (njesam, vjera, ljepo, povjest, tjelo...) or Ijekavian ("nijesam, vijera, lijepo, povijest, tijelo..."). Historically its use was very wide spread, today 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.

Encoding

Character	Ě		ě
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CARON		LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CARON
Encodings	decimal	hex	decimal	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
ISO 8859-2	204	CC	236	EC

See also

• Czech orthography
• Czech phonology