Ve (Arabic letter)

ڤ is a letter of the Arabic-based Afrikaans, Comorian, Jawi, Kurdish, Pegon, and Wakhi scripts. It is derived from the Arabic letter fāʾ (ف) with two additional dots. It represents the sound /v/ and named Ve in the Kurdish, Comorian and Wakhi alphabets, and represents the sound /p/ and named Pa in the Jawi (used for Malay) and Pegon (used for Javanese) alphabets.

Ve originated as one of the new letters added for the Perso-Arabic alphabet to write New Persian, and it was used for the sound /β/. This letter is no longer used in Persian, as the [β]-sound changed to [b], e.g. archaic زڤان /zaβɑn/ > زبان /zæbɒn/ 'language'^[1]

The letter is sometimes used optionally in Arabic to write foreign proper nouns and loanwords with the phoneme /v/ instead of using the standard letter ف /f/, such as ڤولڤو (Volvo), ڤيتنام (Vietnam), and نوڤمبر (November) instead of the standard transcribe فولفو, فيتنام, and نوفمبر. In Egyptian Arabic, it is called فه بتلات نقط (fe be talat noʾaṭ, "Fa' with three dots"). The letter is written ڥ‎ in Algeria and Tunisia, with the dots moved underneath to differentiate it from gāf ‎‎‎ڨ‎‎‎.

The character ڤ is mapped in Unicode under position U+06A4.

The character ڥ‎ is mapped in Unicode under position U+06A5.