Ç
Ç or ç (C-cedilla) 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 (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 languages using the Latin alphabet.
| Ç | |
|---|---|
| Ç ç | |
| (See below) | |
| Usage | |
| Writing system | Latin script |
| Type | Alphabetic and Logographic |
| Language of origin | Old Spanish language |
| Phonetic usage | [s] [t͡ʃ] [d͡ʒ] [t͡s] [d͡z] [ç] [ɽ] [ǂ] [θ] [ð] [ɕ] /sɪˈdɪlə/[ç] |
| Unicode codepoint | U+00C7, U+00E7 |
| History | |
| Development | |
| Time period | ~900 to present |
| Descendants | None |
| Sisters | Zz Źź Żż Žž Ƶƶ Ȥȥ Ɀɀ ʐ ʑ ᵶ ᶎ Ẑẑ Ẕẕ Ẓẓ Ⱬⱬ Ʒʒ Ζζ Зз З́з́ Ҙҙ Ӟӟ З̌з̌ Ӡӡ |
| Transliteration equivalents | ch, c, s, ts |
| Variations | (See below) |
| Other | |
| Other letters commonly used with | c, ch, s, ts |
| Writing direction | Left-to-Right |
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.