I with bowl
I with bowl (majuscule: Ь, minuscule: ь) is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet. It was introduced in 1928 into the reformed Yañalif, and later into other alphabets for Soviet minority languages. The letter was designed specifically to represent the non-front close vowel sounds  and . Thus, this letter corresponds to the letter  in modern Turkic alphabets.

Usage 
The letter was originally included in the Yañalif, and later also in the alphabets of the Kurdish, Abaza, Sami, Ingrian, Kalmyk, Komi, Tsakhur, Azerbaijani and Bashkir languages, as well as in the draft reform of the Udmurt alphabet. During the project of the Latinization of the Russian language, this letter corresponded to the Cyrillic letter . In Kalmyk, however, it represented palatalisation of the preceding consonant, thus corresponding to the Cyrillic homoglyph .

In languages and alphabets that used this letter, the lowercase form of B was a small capital  so that there would be no confusion between  and .

Encoding 
A Latin letter I with bowl hasn't been adopted into Unicode because of the concern that encoding it could open the door to "duplicating the whole Cyrillic alphabet as Latin letters." Instead, computer and mobile users can substitute similar letters, either Ь ь or Ƅ ƅ (Latin letter tone six, the letter that was previously used in the Zhuang alphabet to denote the sixth tone ).

See also 
 Latinisation in the Soviet Union

References

Romanization
Latin alphabets
1928 establishments in the Soviet Union