Serbo-Croatian The inverted breve above is used in traditional
Slavicist notation of
Serbo-Croatian phonology to indicate long falling accent. It is placed above the
syllable nucleus, which can be one of five vowels (ȃ ȇ ȋ ȏ ȗ) or syllabic ȓ. This use of the inverted breve is derived from the
Ancient Greek circumflex, which was preserved in the
polytonic orthography of
Modern Greek and influenced early Serbian
Cyrillic printing through religious literature. In the early 19th century, it began to be used in both Latin and Cyrillic as a
diacritic to mark
prosody in the systematic study of the
Serbo-Croatian linguistic continuum.
International Phonetic Alphabet In the
International Phonetic Alphabet, an inverted breve below [or occasionally above] is used to mark a vowel as non-syllabic, i.e. assuming the role of a
semivowel. The diacritic thus expands upon the four primary symbols the IPA reserves for semivowels, which correspond to the full vowels , respectively. Any vowel is eligible for marking as non-syllabic; a frequent use of the diacritic is in conjunction with the centralised equivalents of the vowels just mentioned: . The same diacritic is placed under
iota to represent the
Proto-Indo-European semivowel as it relates to
Ancient Greek;
upsilon with an inverted breve is also sometimes used insead of
digamma to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel . == Encoding ==