In 1931, it was adopted into the orthography of Shona for a 'whistled' or labialized z, but it was dropped in 1955 due to the lack of the character on typewriters and fonts. Use of this character for Shona was significant enough to be mentioned as an additional character in the 1949 guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet, although the character was never an official part of the IPA.[3][4] However, even at that time, the digraphzv was also used instead of ɀ in Shona writing systems, and zv is the standard way of writing this sound at present.