Latin Letter Small Capital B

Latin Letter Small Capital B at U+0299 is a phonetic letter shaped like a reduced capital B, used to represent a distinct speech sound rather than the ordinary Latin letter b. It is assigned in the IPA Extensions block, where many characters support technical transcription of pronunciation. Its main use is in the International Phonetic Alphabet for the voiced bilabial trill, a sound made by vibrating both lips while voicing, somewhat like a “brrr” vibration. Linguists use it in narrow transcriptions of languages and speech data where this trill is phonemic or phonetically important, including descriptions of languages in parts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. It may also appear in phonetics teaching materials, dictionaries with detailed pronunciation, language documentation, and academic articles comparing bilabial and labiodental sounds. Outside linguistics, the same glyph is sometimes used in stylized small-cap text, but that decorative use is not its Unicode identity and can be confused with formatting a regular capital B in a small-caps font.