Ring (diacritic)

It is a distinct letter in the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Walloon, and Chamorro alphabets.

For example, the word for "horse" used to be written kóň, which evolved, along with pronunciation, into kuoň.

Ultimately, the vowel [o] disappeared completely, and the uo evolved into ů, modern form kůň.

The [uo] pronunciation has prevailed in some Moravian dialects, as well as in Slovak, which uses the letter ô instead of ů.

The ring is used in some dialects of Emilian and Romagnol to distinguish the sound /ʌ/ (å) from /a/ (a).

A fatḥah followed by the letter ⟨ﻱ⟩ (yā’) with a sukūn over it (ـَيْ) is romanized as aẙ.

The difficulty of type-writing it has led some writers to prefer ë for the same sound.

Although similar in appearance, it is not to be confused with the Japanese handakuten (U+309A ◌゚ COMBINING KATAKANA-HIRAGANA SEMI-VOICED SOUND MARK), a diacritic used with the kana for syllables starting with h to indicate that they should instead be pronounced with [p].

[citation needed] In Romagnol, ⟨e̥⟩ is used to represent /ə/ in diphthongs, e.g. Santarcangelo dialect ame̥ig [aˈməiɡ] 'friend', ne̥ud [ˈnəud] 'naked'.

These characters are used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, respectively for mediopalatal pronunciation and strong-onset vowels.