Ě

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: 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.

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