The grapheme Ě, ě (E with caron) is used in Czech and Sorbian alphabets, in Pinyin, in Javanese, in Sundanese and in Proto-Slavic notation.
See also: Czech orthography and Czech phonology. The letter ě is a vestige of Old-Czech palatalization. The originally palatalizing phoneme, yat /ě/ pronounced as /[ʲɛ]/, became extinct, changing to pronounced as /[ɛ]/ or pronounced as /[jɛ]/, but it is preserved as a grapheme.
This letter never appears in the initial position, and its pronunciation depends on the preceding consonant:
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 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 it was eventually dropped from the Gaj's Latin alphabet; it is only found in scientific and historically accurate literature.
Pinyin uses this ě (e caron), not the e breve (ĕ), to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese.
Javanese uses ě (e caron), to indicate pěpět (schwa) (IPA|ə).
Same as Javanese, ě (e caron) in Sundanese also indicates pěpět (schwa) (IPA|ə).