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.
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 many languages, ⟨ç⟩ represents the "soft" sound /
s/ where a ⟨c⟩ would normally represent the "hard" sound /
k/. These include:
Catalan. Known as ce trencada ('broken C') in this language, where it can be used before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ or at the end of a word. Some examples of words with ⟨ç⟩ 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').[1] 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 ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩: 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.[citation needed]
On Albanian, Belgian, European French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swiss, Turkish and Italian keyboards, Ç 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
classic Mac OS and
macOS, these are ⌥ Opt+C and ⌥ Opt+⇧ Shift+C for lower- and uppercase, respectively.
In the
X Window System and many
Unix consoles, one presses sequentially Compose, , and either C or ⇧ Shift+C. Alternatively, one may press AltGr+= and then either C or ⇧ Shift+C.
In
Microsoft Windows, these are Alt+0231 or Alt+135 for lowercase and Alt+0199 or Alt+128 for uppercase.
In
Microsoft Word, these are Ctrl+, and then either C or ⇧ Shift+C.