Ç


Ç or ç is a Latin script letter used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish, Kazakh, and Romance alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Portuguese, and Occitan, as a variant of the letter C with a cedilla. It is also occasionally used in Crimean Tatar and in Tajik to represent the sound. It is rarely used in Balinese, usually only in the word "Çaka" during Nyepi, one of the Balinese Hinduism holidays. It is often retained in the spelling of loanwords from any of these languages in English, Basque, Dutch, Spanish and other languages using the Latin alphabet.
It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate in Old Catalan

as a simplification of "Ci"
It also originated in Old Spanish, where it stems from the form cı Visigothic form of the letter z.
The phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives and in some conditions. Later, changed into in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used the symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century, but it was adopted for writing other languages.

Usage as a letter variant in various languages

In many languages, represents the "soft" sound where a would normally represent the "hard" sound. These include:
  • Catalan. Known as ce trencada in this language, where it can be used before,, or at the end of a word. Some examples of words with are amenaça, torçat, xoriço, forçut, dolç and caça. The only two words starting with ç that can be found in the dictionary are ço and ça, which are rarely used, except for some expressions like ço que. A well-known word with this character is Barça, a common Catalan clipping of Futbol Club Barcelona. When writing by hand, Catalans don't write ç with a cedilla under it, but a symbol similar to a comma, which crosses the c. In fact, some scholars like Jesús Alturo claim that ce trencada evolved from combining c and i instead of the letter z.
  • French : français, garçon, façade, grinçant, leçon, reçu. French does not use the character at the end of a word but it can occur at the beginning of a word. It is never used in French where C would denote /s/ nor before h.
  • Occitan : torçut, çò, ça que la, braç, brèç, voraç. It can occur at the beginning or end of words.
  • Portuguese : it is used before,, : taça, braço, açúcar. Modern Portuguese does not use the character at the beginning or at the end of a word. According to a Portuguese grammar written in 1550, the letter ç had the sound of /dz/ around that time. Another grammar written around 1700 would say that the letter ç sounds like /s/, which shows a phonetic evolution that is still valid today.
  • Old Galician used the ç letter, however it is no longer present in the official norm for the Galician language by the Royal Galician Academy. However, the unofficial norm for the Galician language by the AGAL reclaims as part of the language.
  • Old Spanish used to represent /t͡s/.
  • Early Modern Spanish used the letter ç to represent either /θ/ or /s/ before /a/, /o/, and /u/ in much the same way as Modern Spanish uses the letter z. Middle Castilian Spanish pronounced as /θ/. Andalusian, Canarian, and Latin American Spanish pronounced as /s/. A spelling reform in the 18th century eliminated from Spanish orthography.
In other languages, it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate :
  • Albanian
  • Turkish
  • Friulian before,, or at the end of a word.
  • Balinese Ç usually used to commemorate the Nyepi holiday only used in the word 'Çaka', for example:
  • :"Selamat Hari Raya Nyepi tahun Çaka 1945"
  • :
  • In Manx it is used in the digraph, which also represents, to differentiate it from normal, which represents.

    In loanwords only

  • In Basque, is used in the loanword Curaçao.
  • In Dutch, it can be found in some words from French and Portuguese, such as façade, reçu, Provençaals and Curaçao.
  • In English, is used in loanwords such as façade and limaçon.

    As a separate letter in various languages

It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate in the following languages:
In the 2020 version of the Latin Kazakh Alphabet, the letter represents the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate, which is similar to.
It previously represented a voiceless palatal click in Juǀʼhoansi and Naro, though the former has replaced it with and the latter with.
The similarly shaped letter the is used in the Cyrillic alphabets of Bashkir and Chuvash to represent and, respectively.
In Tatar, ç represents.
It also represents the retroflex flap in the Rohingya Latin alphabet.
Janalif uses this letter to represent the voiced postalveolar affricate
Old Malay uses ç to represent and.

Computer

  • Input

On Albanian, Belgian, European French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swiss, Turkish and Italian keyboards, is directly available as a separate key. On most other keyboards, other methods must be used. It can also be typed with.