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 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.
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 (Ꝣ). 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 (which replaced ç with the now-devoiced z), but it was adopted for writing other languages.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiceless palatal fricative.
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 ('broken C') in this language, where it can be used before or at the end of a word. Some examples of words with 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'). It is never used in French where C would denote /s/ (before e, i, y) nor before h.
Occitan (ce cedilha): torçut ('twisted'), çò ('this'), ça que la ('nevertheless'), braç ('arm'), brèç ('cradle'), voraç ('voracious'). It can occur at the beginning or end of words.
Portuguese (cê-cedilha, cê de cedilha or cê cedilhado): it is used before : 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.
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 the ç as part of the language.
Old Spanish used ç to represent /t͡s/. It also represented /d͡z/ allophonically when it occurred before a voiced consonant.
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 ç as /θ/, or as /ð/ before a voiced consonant. Andalusian, Canarian, and Latin American Spanish pronounced ç as /s/, or as /z/ before a voiced consonant. A spelling reform in the 18th century eliminated ç from Spanish orthography.
In other languages, it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate (like in English chalk):
Friulian (c cun cedilie) before or at the end of a word.
In Manx, it is used in the digraph , which also represents , to differentiate it from normal , which represents .
In loanwords only
In Basque, (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, is used in loanwords such as façade and limaçon (although the cedilla mark is often dropped: ).
as a separate letter in various languages
It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate in the following languages:
the 4th letter of the Albanian alphabet.
the 4th letter of the Azerbaijani alphabet.
the 4th letter of the Turkish alphabet.
the 3rd letter of the Turkmen alphabet.
the 4th letter of the Kurmanji alphabet (also known as Northern Kurdish).
the 4th letter of the Zazaki alphabet.
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 (Ҫ ҫ) 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; 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 or . Alternatively one may press or . The Canadian French layout has a dedicated dead key in the spot of the key.
In classic Mac OS and macOS, these are and for lower- and uppercase, respectively.
In the X Window System and many Unix consoles, one presses sequentially , and either or . Alternatively, one may press and then either or .
In Microsoft Windows, these are or for lowercase and or for uppercase.
In Microsoft Word, these are and then either or .
The HTML character entity references are &ccedil; and &Ccedil; 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
Ҹ
References
C-cedilla
Phonetic transcription symbols
Polish letters with diacritics