Cedilla

A cedilla is a mark added to a letter of the alphabet. It is used in the orthographies of French, Portuguese and a few other languages, including many Turkic languages.

The cedilla is most commonly used with the letters 'c' and 's', but it is rarely used with other letters. When a 'c' has a cedilla, that means it is said like an s and not like a k. This is called a soft c. In Turkic languages, it represents the sound of English cheese. When an 's' has a cedilla, it is said like the sound of English sheep.

Some examples of cedillas used with letters that are not 'c' or 's' are:

• In Gagauz, the letter 't' is used with a cedilla to produce the sound /ts/, like the German 'z' sound in zunge.
• The Latvian letters ģ, ķ, ļ, and ņ are sometimes interpreted as having cedillas, which they do in some fonts, but most of the time, they have commas. In Unicode, these letters are named as if they have cedillas.
• Vute, an African language, uses cedilla to mark nasalization of its vowels, for example: a̧, ə̧, o̧.

Related pages

• Tilde
• Diacritic

References