Ç

Ç or ç (C-cedilla) is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish, Zazaki, and Romance alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Friulian, Ligurian, Occitan, and Portuguese as a variant of the letter C. It is also occasionally used in Crimean Tatar and in Tajik (when written in the Latin script) to represent the /d͡ʒ/ sound. It is often retained in the spelling of loanwords from any of these languages in English, Basque, Dutch, Spanish and other Latin script spelled languages.

This article is about the Latin script letter. For the voiceless palatal fricative represented by ç in the IPA, see Voiceless palatal fricative.
Ç
Ç ç
(See below)
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
TypeAlphabetic and Logographic
Language of originOld Spanish language
Phonetic usage[s]
[t͡ʃ]
[d͡ʒ]
[t͡s]
[d͡z]
[ç]
[ɽ]
[ǂ]
/ˈsiːsɪˈdɪlə/
Unicode codepointU+00C7, U+00E7
History
Development
Time period~900 to present
DescendantsNone
SistersNone
Transliteration equivalentsch, c, s, ts
Variations(See below)
Other
Other letters commonly used withc, ch, s, ts

It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /t͡s/ in Old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter z (Ꝣ). The phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives /t/ and /k/ in some conditions. Later, /t͡s/ changed into /s/ in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used the symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century (which replaced ç with the now-devoiced z), but it was adopted for writing other languages.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, /ç/ represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

Usage as a letter variant in various languages
Evolution from Visigoth Z to modern Ç.

In many languages, ⟨ç⟩ represents the "soft" sound /s/ where a ⟨c⟩ would normally represent the "hard" sound /k/. These include:

  • Catalan. Known as ce trencada ('broken C') in this language, where it can be used before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ or at the end of a word. Some examples of words with ⟨ç⟩ are amenaça ('menace'), torçat ('twisted'), xoriço ('chorizo'), forçut ('strong'), dolç ('sweet') and caça ('hunting'). A well-known word with this character is Barça, a common Catalan clipping of Futbol Club Barcelona.
  • French (cé cédille): français ('French'), garçon ('boy'), façade ('frontage'), grinçant ('squeaking'), leçon ('lesson'), reçu ('received' [past participle]). French does not use the character at the end of a word but it can occur at the beginning of a word (e.g., ça, 'that').[1]
  • Occitan (ce cedilha): torçut ('twisted'), çò ('this'), ça que la ('nevertheless'), braç ('arm'), brèç ('cradle'), voraç ('voracious'). It can occur at the beginning of a word.
  • Portuguese (cê-cedilha or cê cedilhado): it is used before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩: taça ('cup'), braço ('arm'), açúcar ('sugar'). Modern Portuguese does not use the character at the beginning or at the end of a word (the nickname for Conceição is São, not Ção). 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.
  • Manx aaçhent ('to flash back'), atçhim ('terror'), çhaggil ('Gather') the digraph çh makes a /tʃ/ sound and so does tçh

In other languages, it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/ (like ⟨ch⟩ in English chalk):

In Manx, it is used in the digraph ⟨çh⟩, which also represents /t͡ʃ/, to differentiate it from normal ⟨ch⟩, which represents /x/.

In loanwords only
  • In Basque, ⟨ç⟩ (known as ze hautsia) 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, ⟨ç⟩ is used in loanwords such as façade and limaçon (although the cedilla mark is often dropped: ⟨facade⟩, ⟨limacon⟩).
  • In modern Spanish it can appear in loanwords, especially in Catalan proper nouns.

Usage as a separate letter in various languages

It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /t͡ʃ/ in the following languages:

In Kazakh, as the 4th letter of the Kazakh alphabets based on 2020 amendment of its alphabets, it however represents /tɕ/, this is a little different by other Turkic languages.

It previously represented a voiceless palatal click /ǂ/ in Juǀʼhoansi and Naro, though the former has replaced it with ⟨ǂ⟩ and the latter with ⟨tc⟩.

The similarly shaped letter the (Ҫ ҫ) is used in the Cyrillic alphabets of Bashkir and Chuvash to represent /θ/ and /ɕ/, respectively.

It also represents the retroflex flap /ɽ/ in the Rohingya Latin alphabet.

Janalif uses this letter to represent the voiced postalveolar affricate /d͡ʒ/

Old Malay uses ç to represent /dʒ/ and /ɲ/.

Computer
Character information
PreviewÇçꝢꝣ
Unicode nameLATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLALATIN SMALL LETTER C WITH CEDILLALATIN CAPITAL LETTER VISIGOTHIC ZLATIN SMALL LETTER VISIGOTHIC Z
Encodingsdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhex
Unicode199U+00C7231U+00E742850U+A76242851U+A763
UTF-8195 135C3 87195 167C3 A7234 157 162EA 9D A2234 157 163EA 9D A3
Numeric character referenceÇÇççꝢꝢꝣꝣ
Named character referenceÇç

Input

On Albanian, Belgian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Italian keyboards, Ç is directly available as a separate key; however, on most other keyboards, including the US and British keyboard, a combination of keys must be used:

  • In the US-International keyboard layout, these are ' followed by either C or ⇧ Shift+C. Alternatively one may press AltGr+, or AltGr+⇧ Shift+,.
  • In classic Mac OS and macOS, these are ⌥ Opt+C and ⌥ Opt+⇧ Shift+C for lower- and uppercase, respectively.
  • In the X Window System and many Unix consoles, one presses sequentially Compose, , and either C or ⇧ Shift+C. Alternatively, one may press AltGr+= and then either C or ⇧ Shift+C.
  • In Microsoft Windows, these are Alt+0231 or Alt+135 for lowercase and Alt+0199 or Alt+128 for uppercase.
  • In Microsoft Word, these are Ctrl+, and then either C or ⇧ Shift+C.
  • The HTML character entity references are ç and Ç for lower- and uppercase, respectively.
  • In TeX and LaTeX, \c is used for adding the cedilla accent to a letter, so \c{c} produces "ç".

See also

References
  1. The Académie Française online dictionary also gives çà and çûdra.
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