'Ă' (
upper case) or 'ă' (
lower case), usually referred to in English as 'A-breve', is a
letter used in standard
Romanian language and
Vietnamese language orthographies. In
Romanian, it is used to represent the
mid-central unrounded vowel, while in Vietnamese it represents the short 'a' sound. It is the second letter of both the
Romanian and the
Vietnamese alphabets.
Ă/ă is also used in the
transliteration of
Bulgarian letter
Ъ/
ъ in
Slovak,
Czech, and
Swedish.
==
Romanian==
The sound represented in Romanian by 'ă', although called a
schwa (misleadingly suggesting an unstressed lax sound), is a vowel in its own right. Unlike
English or
French, but similar to
Bulgarian and
Afrikaans, it can be stressed. There are words in which it is the only vowel, such as "măr" (''apple'') or "văd" (''I see''). Additionally, some words which also contain other vowels can have the stress on 'ă', like in the examples "cările" (''the books'') and "odăi" (''rooms'').
==
Vietnamese==
Ă is the 2nd letter of the
Vietnamese alphabet and represent . Because Vietnamese is a
tonal language this letter may optionally have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it. See
Vietnamese phonology.
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See also
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A with breve (Cyrillic), Cyrillic letter а with breve, visually indistinguishable
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Breve