"Ŭ" or "ŭ" is a letter in the Belarusian language, when written in the Łacinka alphabet (based on the Latin alphabet), and is also a letter in the Esperanto alphabet.

Belarusian

The Belarusian language was normally written with the Łacinka alphabet from the 16th to late 19th centuries. Its use has been slowly reemerging since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The letter Ŭ is pronounced as a voiced labiovelar semivowel, represented by in IPA.

When Belarusian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, the same letter is written as Ў or ў.

Esperanto

"Ŭ" is a semivowel in the Esperanto alphabet, which was devised in the late 19th century. Its sound is represented by [w] in IPA, and was originally meant to indicate a doubled u, or w, sound.

A common hypothesis is that the Esperanto letter was derived from Belarusian, which can be inferred from these observations:

• Belarusian is the only natural language whose orthography contains this letter.
• The letter has the same pronunciation in the two languages.
• Esperanto's creator, Ludwik Zamenhof, was born in Białystok in the vicinity of Belarus.
• There is evidence that Zamenhof referred also to his native dialect when constructing Esperanto.

However, Zamenhof first used the Ŭ in 1887 in the Unua Libro, whereas the first attested use of Ŭ in Belarussian was in 1891 in a poetry collection by Francišak Benedykt Bahuševic. While it is possible that Ŭ was already in use in Belarussian before Bahuševic' poetry collection, another possibility is that the letter was borrowed into Łacinka from Esperanto, rather than the other way around. It is of course equally likely that the Ŭ developed independently in both Esperanto and Belarussian.

Other uses

It is also a letter in some philological transcriptions of Latin, denoting a shorter U, and the McCune-Reischauer Romanization of Korean uses "ŭ" to signify the vowel [ɯ].

See also

• Ĉ
• Ĝ
• Ĥ
• Ĵ
• Ŝ

External links

• Belarusian alphabet