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(c-cedilla) is a letter of Albanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar, and Kurdish language. This letter also appears in English, French, Portuguese, Occitan, Catalan and Friulian language as a variant of letter “c”.
It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter "z". This 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 this symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century, but it was adopted for writing other languages.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

Contents

Usage as a letter variant in various languages

Usage as a separate letter in various languages

Computer

Character mappings

Input

References

See also

External links

Usage as a letter variant in various languages

It represents the "soft" sound where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound (before "a", "o", "u", or at the end of a word), in the following languages:

★ French (''cé cédille''). Examples: ''grinçant'' "squeaking", ''leçon'' "lesson", ''reçu'' "received" (past participle). French uses this character at the beginning of a word (''ça'' "that"), but not at the end.^[1] In French comic books that are hand-lettered in all-capitals, the cedilla is written as a slash crossing the center of the lower hook of the letter "C", at the angle of an acute accent.

★ English. A few words are sometimes spelled in English with a "ç", almost all of them borrowings from French. For example, ''soupçon'', ''garçon'', and ''façade.''

★ Catalan. Known as ''ce trencada'' (that is, "broken C") in this language. Some examples of words with "c"-cedilla are: ''torçut'' "twisted", ''ço'' "this", ''braç'' "arm", ''falç'' "sickle", ''voraç'' "voracious". A well-known word with this character is Barça, a common Catalan diminutive for the F.C. Barcelona, one of Barcelona's football teams, also used across the world, including by the Spanish-language media.

★ Occitan (''ce cedilha''). Examples: ''torçut'' "twisted", ''çò'' "this", ''ça que la'' "nevertheless", ''braç'' "arm", ''brèç'' "cradle", ''voraç'' "voracious".

★ Portuguese (''cê cedilhado'' or ''cê cedilha''). Examples: ''taça'' "cup", ''braço'' "arm", ''açúcar'' "sugar". Modern Portuguese never uses this character at the beginning or at the end of a word.

★ Castilian and Basque (before the 20th century)
In standard Friulian, it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate before "a", "o", "u" or at the end of a word.

Usage as a separate letter in various languages

It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate in the following languages:

★ Albanian: the 4th letter of the Albanian alphabet.

★ Azerbaijani: the 4th letter of the Azerbaijani alphabet.

★ Kurdish: the 4th letter of the Kurdish Kurmanji alphabet.

★ Tatar: the 5th letter of the Tatar alphabet (based on Zamanälif).

★ Turkish: the 4th letter of the Turkish alphabet.

★ Turkmen: the 3rd letter of the Turkmen alphabet.

Computer

Character mappings

Charset	Unicode	ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 9, 14, 15, 16
Majuscule	U+00C7	C7
Minuscule	U+00E7	E7

Input

★ In extended ASCII, "Ç" can be typed using ALT + 128 and "ç" can be typed using ALT + 135.

★ In Mac OS, "Ç" can be typed using shift + option + c and "ç" can be typed using option + c

★ In HTML character entity references Ç and ç can be used.

References

1. The French Academy online dictionary also gives ''çà'' and ''çûdra''.

See also

★ Cedilla

External links

★ Omniglot - writing systems & languages of the world

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★ Albanian language

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★ Azerbaijani language

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★ Kurdish language

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★ Tatar language

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★ Turkish language

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★ Turkmen language