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C, or c, is the third letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is cee (pronounced ), plural cees."C" Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition (1989); Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged (1993); "cee", op. cit.
In the Etruscan language, plosive consonants had no contrastive phonation, so the Greek language 'Gamma' (Gamma) was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet to represent . Already in the Western Greek alphabet, Gamma first took a form in Early Etruscan, then in Classical Etruscan. In Latin, it eventually took the 'c' form in Classical Latin. In the earliest Latin inscriptions, the letters 'c k q' were used to represent the sounds and (which were not differentiated in writing). Of these, 'q' was used to represent or before a rounded vowel, 'k' before 'a', and 'c' elsewhere. During the 3rd century BC, a modified character was introduced for , and 'c' itself was retained for . The use of 'c' (and its variant 'g') replaced most usages of 'k' and 'q'. Hence, in the classical period and after, 'g' was treated as the equivalent of Greek gamma, and 'c' as the equivalent of kappa; this shows in the romanization of Greek words, as in 'ΚΑΔΜΟΣ', 'ΚΥΡΟΣ', and 'ΦΩΚΙΣ' came into Latin as 'cadmvs', 'cyrvs' and 'phocis', respectively.
Other alphabets have letters to 'c' but not analogous in use and derivation, like the Cyrillic script letter Es (С, с) which derives from the lunate sigma.
In Vulgar Latin, became palatalized to in Italy and Dalmatia; in France and the Iberian Peninsula, it became . Yet for these new sounds, was still used before the letters and . The letter thus represented two distinct values. Subsequently, the Latin phoneme (spelled ) de-labialized to , meaning that the various Romance languages had before front vowels. In addition, Norman language used the letter so that the sound could be represented by either or , the latter of which could represent either or depending on whether it preceded a front vowel letter or not. The convention of using both and was applied to the writing of English after the Norman Conquest, causing a considerable re-spelling of the Old English words. Thus, while Old English candel, clif, corn, crop, and cú, remained unchanged, cent, cǣᵹ (cēᵹ), cyng, brece, and sēoce, were now (without any change of sound) spelled Kent, keȝ, kyng, breke, and seoke; even cniht () was subsequently changed to kniht, and þic () was changed to thik or thikk. The Old English was also at length displaced by the French so that the Old English cwēn () and cwic () became Middle English quen and quik, respectively.
The sound , to which Old English palatalized had advanced, also occurred in French, chiefly from Latin before . In French, it was represented by the digraph , as in champ (from Latin camp-um), and this spelling was introduced into English: the Hatton Gospels, written , have in Matt. i-iii, child, chyld, riche, and mychel, for the cild, rice, and mycel of the Old English version whence they were copied. In these cases, the Old English gave way to , and ; on the other hand, in its new value of appeared largely in French words like processiun, emperice, and grace and was also substituted for in a few Old English words, as miltse, bletsien, in early Middle English milce, blecien. By the end of the thirteenth century, both in France and England, this sound was de-affricated to ; and from that time, has represented before front vowels either for etymology reasons, as in lance, cent, or to avoid the ambiguity due to the "etymological" use of for , as in ace, mice, once, pence, defence.
Thus, to show etymology, English spelling has advise, devise (instead of *advize, *devize), while advice, device, dice, ice, mice, twice, etc., do not reflect etymology; example has extended this to hence, pence, defence, etc., where there is no etymological reason for using . Former generations also wrote sence for sense. Hence, today, the Romance languages and English language have a common feature inherited from Vulgar Latin spelling conventions where takes on either a "hard" or "soft" value depending on the following letter.
| + Pronunciation of by language !Orthography !Phonemes !Environment | |
| Before e, i | |
| Before e, i, y, æ, ø | |
| Before e, i, y | |
| Before e, i in loanwords from Italian | |
| Before e, i, y | |
| Before ea, ia, ie, io, iu | |
| Before e, i | |
| Before e, i, y | |
| or | Before e, i |
| Before ä, e, i, ö, ü, y in loanwords and names | |
| Before e, i; or after i | |
| Before e, i | |
| Before e, i, y, æ, ø in loanwords and names | |
| Before i | |
| Before e, i, y | |
| Before e, i | |
| Before e, i | |
| Before e, i; or after i | |
| or | Before e, i, y |
| Before e, i, y, ä, ö | |
| Before e, i | |
| Word-finally | |
The digraph most commonly represents , but can also represent (mainly in words of Greek origin) or (mainly in words of French language origin). For some dialects of English, it may also represent in words like loch, while other speakers pronounce the final sound as . The trigraph always represents . The digraph is often used to represent the sound after short vowels, like in "wicket".
C is the Letter frequency in the English language (after E, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, and L), with a frequency of about 2.8% in words.
Germanic languages usually use for Romance loans or digraphs, such as and , but the rules vary across languages. Of all the Germanic languages, only English uses the initial in native Germanic words like come. Other than English, Dutch language uses the most, for most Romance loans and the digraph . German uses in the digraphs and , and the trigraph , but by itself only in unassimilated loanwords and proper names. Danish language keeps soft in Romance words but changes hard to . Swedish has the same rules for soft and hard as Danish, and also uses in the digraph and the very common word och, "and". Norwegian, Afrikaans, and Icelandic are the most restrictive, replacing all cases of with or , and reserving for unassimilated loanwords and names.
All Balto-Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, as well as Albanian, Hungarian, Pashto language, several Sami languages, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and Americanist phonetic notation (and those aboriginal languages of North America whose practical orthography derives from it), use to represent , the voiceless alveolar or voiceless dental sibilant affricate. In Hanyu Pinyin, the standard romanization of Standard Chinese, the letter represents an aspirated version of this sound, .
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, represents a variety of sounds. Yup'ik, Indonesian, Malay language, and a number of African languages such as Hausa language, Fula language, and Manding share the soft Italian value of . In Azeri language, Crimean Tatar, Northern Kurdish, and Turkish language, stands for the voiced counterpart of this sound, the voiced postalveolar affricate . In Yabem language and similar languages, such as Bukawa language, stands for a glottal stop . Xhosa language and Zulu language use this letter to represent the click . In some other African languages, such as Berber languages, is used for . In Fijian language, stands for a voiced dental fricative , while in Somali language it has the value of .
The letter is also used as a transliteration of Cyrillic in the Latin forms of Serbian alphabet, Macedonian, and sometimes Ukrainian, along with the digraph .
As in English, , with the value , is often used after short vowels in other Germanic languages such as German and Swedish language (other Germanic languages, such as Dutch and Norwegian, use instead). The digraph is found in Polish and in Hungarian, representing and respectively. The digraph represents in Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian (where this only happens before , while otherwise it represents ). The trigraph represents in German.
Variant forms of the letter have unique code points for specialist use: the alphanumeric symbols set in mathematics and science, voiceless palatal sounds in linguistics, and halfwidth and fullwidth forms for legacy CJK characters font compatibility. The Cyrillic homoglyph of the Latin has a separate encoding: .
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