All of the languages it is used in also use its dotted counterpart İ while not using the basic Latin letter I.

The dotless ı may also be used as a stylistic variant of the dotted i, without there being any meaningful difference between them.

This is common in older Irish orthography, for example, but is simply the omission of the tittle rather than a separate letter.

In some of the Athabaskan languages of the Northwest Territories in Canada, specifically Slavey, Dogrib and Chipewyan, all instances of i are undotted to avoid confusion with tone-marked vowels í or ì. Lowercase dotless ı is used as the lowercase form of the letter Í in the official Karakalpak alphabet approved in 2016.

Both the dotted and dotless I can be used in transcriptions of Rusyn to allow distinguishing between the letters Ы and И, which would otherwise be both transcribed as "y", despite representing different phonemes.