Oe (Cyrillic)


Oe or barred O is a letter of the Cyrillic script.

Shape

Its form was copied from the Latin letter barred O used in Jaꞑalif and other alphabets.
Despite having a similar shape, it is related neither to the Greek letter theta nor to the archaic Cyrillic letter fita.

Usage

Oe is used in the alphabets of the Bashkir, Buryat, Kalmyk, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Komi-Yazva, Kyrgyz, Mongolian, Sakha, Selkup, Tatar and Tuvan languages.
In Turkic languages, it commonly represents the front rounded vowels // or //. In Kazakh and Karakalpak, it may also express //. In Mongolic languages, it usually represents // or //. The letter has also been adopted in the spelling of the Komi-Yazva language, where it represents a close-mid centralized back unrounded or weakly rounded vowel //. In Kyrgyz, Mongolian and Tuvan, the Cyrillic letter can be written as a double vowel.
LanguageSound
Bashkir
Buryat
Kalmyk
Karakalpak
Kazakh
Komi-Yazva
Kyrgyz
Mongolian
Sakha
Selkup
Tatar
Tuvan
Uilta

Until a new alphabet was published in 2016, Oe was used to represent // in Negidal.
Oe is most commonly romanized as ; but its ISO 9 transliteration is. In 2018, there were proposals to use as a romanization of Oe in Kazakh, but a year later it was certified as.
The International Phonetic Alphabet uses the identically shaped Latin counterpart, ɵ, to represent the close-mid central [rounded vowel], and sometimes also the mid central rounded vowel.