Ě

The letter ě is a vestige of Old-Czech palatalization. The originally-palatalizing phoneme, yat /ě/ [ʲɛ], became extinct and changed to [ɛ] or [jɛ], but it is preserved as a grapheme.

The letter never appears in the initial position, and its pronunciation depends on the preceding consonant:

• Dě, tě, ně [ɟɛ, cɛ, ɲɛ] is written instead of ďe, ťe, ňe (analogously to di, ti, ni).
• Bě, pě, vě, fě is written instead of bje, pje, vje, fje. Nevertheless, some words (vjezd, "entry, drive-in"; objem, "volume") are written with bje, vje because , je- is part of the etymological root of the word, preceded by the prefix v- or ob-.
• Mě [mɲɛ] is written instead of mňe. For etymological reasons, mně is written in some words (jemný, "soft" -> jemně, "softly").

The grapheme is sometimes used in Serbo-Croatian to denote a jat (něsam, věra, lěpo, pověst, tělo). It is pronounced in different ways depending on the dialect: Ekavian (nesam, vera, lepo, povest, telo), Ikavian (nisam, vira, lipo, povist, tilo) or Ijekavian (nijesam, vjera, lijepo, povijest, tijelo). Historically its use was very widespread, but it gradually lost favour to combined j and e graphemes and was eventually dropped from the Gaj's Latin alphabet. It is found only in scientific and historically-accurate literature.

In Interslavic, the letter is the Latin alphabet rendition of the etymological yat, with the assigned sound equivalent to the Czech pronunciation of /ě/. It is a palatalizing vowel. This vowel is the continuation of the Proto-Slavic *ě, and uses the same grapheme to preserve the tradition. The prescribed Cyrillic equivalent is Є, but the traditional yat symbol Ѣ ѣ has also seen occasional use.

Mandarin

Pinyin uses this ě (e caron), not the e breve (ĕ), to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese.

Southern Min

Tâi-Lô use ě to indicate the sixth tone of Southern Min (Taiwanese).

Indonesian uses ě (e caron), to indicate pěpět (schwa) ⟨ə⟩ as well as Javanese and Sundanese.

Javanese uses ě (e caron), to indicate pěpět (schwa) ⟨ə⟩.

Like in Javanese, ě (e caron) in Sundanese also indicates pěpět (schwa) ⟨ə⟩.