Yā '

Ya in isolated form

connected shapes
ـي	ـيـ	يـ
from the right	both sides	to the left

Yā ' ( Arabic ياء, DMG Yāʾ ) is the 28th letter of the Arabic alphabet . It emerged from the Phoenician iodine and is thus related to the Latin I (and thus also J ), the Greek Iota and the Hebrew iodine . The numerical value 10 is assigned to it.

Sound value and transcription

Ya with Hamza about it

associated forms with Hamza
ـئ	ـئـ	ئـ
to the right	both sides	to the left

The Ya is one of the two semiconsonants in Arabic. Depending on the word, it stands for a consonant or serves to lengthen the vowel.

• As a consonant, the Ya corresponds to the J in "Julius" and the "Y" in "Yacht". It is reproduced with a “y” in the DMG inscription;
• As a sign for the vowel elongation, Ya stands for the closed (= "long") I as in "Ida", as an elongation of the short i ( Kasra ). It is then reproduced in the DMG romanization as "i" with a line above it (ī).

Furthermore, Ya can serve as a carrier vowel for the Hamza , but is written without diacritical points.

Spelling

Ya with no points

In some Arab countries the diacritical points of the ya are often omitted. However, this can lead to confusion with the Alif maqsura .

In Persian and many writing systems derived from the Persian variant of the Arabic alphabet, Ya is regularly written without dots (ی). Among other things, in the Uighur alphabet and in the Pashtun script , these two variants differ aloud. In addition, some Arabic alphabets have other variants of the Ya.

Ya in unicode

Unicode codepoint	U + 064A
Unicode name	ARABIC LETTER YEH
HTML	ي
ISO 8859-6	0xea

If Ya should always be written without periods at the end, use the following code:

Unicode codepoint	U + 06CC
Unicode name	ARABIC LETTER PERSIAN YEH
HTML	ی
ISO 8859-6	unavailable