Ve (Arabic letter)

Ve (ڤ) is a letter of the Arabic-based Comoro, Kurdish, Luri, Swahili, Wakhi and Malay alphabets. It is derived from the Arabic letter Fāʾ (ف) with two additional dots. It represents the sound /v/ in the aforementioned uses. On the other hand, the letter Pa (ڤ) represents the sound /p/ in the Jawi (used for Malay) and Pegon (used for Javanese) alphabets.^[1]

Egyptian 7 Up feautring the letter Ve (ڤ) in the Arabized version of seven (سڤن), note also that the letters Alif mahmūza (أ‎) and Pe (پ) are used to resemble the number 7

South African text by Abu Bakr Effendi in Arabic Afrikaans (upper) and Arabic (lower) showing the Ve (ڤ) in the word "vote" (ڤوت) used in Arabic even though the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) word for vote is /sˤawt (صوت)

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'^[2]

The letter Ve is sometimes used in various Arabic dialects to write names and loanwords with the phoneme /v/, such as Volvo (ڤولڤو),Vietnam (ڤيتنام), November (نوڤمبر) and Vienna (ڤيينا), but rather described, for example, in Egyptian Arabic, it is called Fāʾ with three dots (Arabic: فه بتلات نقط, lit. 'Fā' be talat noʾaṭ').