Cedilla

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A cedilla (/sɪˈdɪlə/ sih-DIH-lə; from Spanish cedilla, "small ceda", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French cédille, pronounced [sedij]), is a hook or tail ( ¸ ) added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan (where it is called trenc), French, and Portuguese (where it is called a cedilha) it is used only under the letter c (forming ç), and the entire letter is called, respectively, c trencada (i.e. "broken C"), c cédille, and c cedilhado (or c cedilha, colloquially). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute from Cameroon.

This diacritic is not to be confused with the ogonek (◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to the diacrital comma, which is used in the Romanian and Latvian alphabets, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.

Origin

The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature

The most frequent character with cedilla is "ç" ("c" with cedilla, as in façade). It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /ts/ in old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter "z" (ꝣ), whose upper loop was lengthened and reinterpreted as a "c", whereas its lower loop became the diminished appendage, the cedilla.

It represents the "soft" sound /s/, the

It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate /tʃ/ (as in English "church") in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Friulian, Kurdish, Tatar, Turkish (as in çiçek, çam, çekirdek, Çorum), and Turkmen. It is also sometimes used this way in Manx, to distinguish it from the velar fricative.

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

S

The character "ş" represents the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ (as in "show") in several languages, including many belonging to the Turkic languages, and included as a separate letter in their alphabets:

• Turkish
• Azerbaijani
• Crimean Tatar
• Gagauz
• Tatar
• Turkmen
• S-comma [Ș] was missing from pre-3.0 Unicode
  standards, and older standards, still frequent, but an error)
• Kurdish

In

T

Gagauz uses Ţ (T with cedilla), one of the few languages to do so, and Ş (S with cedilla). Besides being present in some Gagauz orthographies, T with Cedilla also exists in the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, in the Kabyle language, in the Manjak and Mankanya languages, and possibly elsewhere.

The Unicode characters for Ţ (T with cedilla) and Ş (S with cedilla) were implemented for Romanian in Windows-1250. In Windows 7, Microsoft corrected the error by replacing T-cedilla with T-comma (Ț) and S-cedilla with S-comma (Ș).

In 1868, Ambroise Firmin-Didot suggested in his book Observations sur l'orthographe, ou ortografie, française (Observations on French Spelling) that French phonetics could be better regularized by adding a cedilla beneath the letter "t" in some words. For example, the suffix -tion this letter is usually not pronounced as (or close to) /t/ in French, but as /sjɔ̃/. It has to be distinctly learned that in words such as diplomatie (but not diplomatique) it is pronounced /s/. A similar effect occurs with other prefixes or within words. Firmin-Didot surmised that a new character could be added to French orthography. A letter of the same description

Languages with other characters with cedillas

Marshallese

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In

As of 2011[update], many font rendering engines do not display any of these properly, for two reasons:

• "ļ" and "ņ" usually do not display properly at all, because of the use of the cedilla in Latvian. Unicode has precombined glyphs for these letters, but most quality fonts display them with comma below diacritics to accommodate the expectations of Latvian orthography. This is considered nonstandard in Marshallese. The use of a zero-width non-joiner between the letter and the diacritic can alleviate this problem: "l‌̧" and "n‌̧" may display properly, but may not; see below.
• "m̧" and "o̧" do not currently exist in Unicode as precombined glyphs, and must be encoded as the plain Latin letters "m" and "o" with the
  Windows do not display combining diacritics properly, showing them too far to the right of the letter, as with Tahoma ("m̧" and "o̧") and Times New Roman ("m̧" and "o̧"). This mostly affects "m̧", and may or may not affect "o̧". But some common Unicode fonts like Arial Unicode MS ("m̧" and "o̧"), Cambria ("m̧" and "o̧") and Lucida Sans Unicode
  ("m̧" and "o̧") do not have this problem. When "m̧" is properly displayed, the cedilla is either underneath the center of the letter, or is underneath the right-most leg of the letter, but is always directly underneath the letter wherever it is positioned.