It represents the voiced alveolo-palatal fricative /ʑ/.

One of the first observations of the sound /ʑ/ in Montenegrin, was made by Vuk Karadžić in 1818, in his article "Srpski rječnik istolkovan njemačkim i latinskim riječima" in which he notes that Herzegovians (a cultural region which stretches over Montenegro, thus presumably he also referred to Montenegrins considering he notes words such as iźeo, which are present in Montenegro but not in Herzegovina): "Ercegovci, kašto izgovaraju s pred j kao Poljsko ś, a z kao ź, n. p. sjekira, sjutra, izjeo..." First instance of usage of the accented Cyrillic letter з́ was in 1926. by Danilo Vušović.

The letter originates from rural areas in Montenegro.

[citation needed] Being a relatively recent letter, not present in any legacy 8-bit Cyrillic encoding, the letter З́ is not represented directly by a precomposed character in Unicode either; it has to be composed as З+◌́ (U+0301).

This article related to the Cyrillic script is a stub.