ASCII Character Ů

The character Ů (ů; a Latin U with overring, or kroužek in Czech Republic) is a grapheme in Czech preserved for historic reasons, which identifies a vowel shift. The letter ů now has the same pronunciation as the letter ú (long [uː]), but changes to a short o when a word is morphed, thus showing the historical evolution of the language. Ů cannot occur in initial position. However, ú occurs almost exclusively in initial position or at the beginning of a word root in a compound. These characters are used also in Steuer's Silesian alphabet. The [uo] pronunciation has prevailed in some Moravian dialects, as well as in Slovak, which uses the letter ô instead of ů.