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A cedilla ( ; from Spanish language ', "small ceda", i.e. small "z"), or cedille''' (from French cédille, ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a Diacritic) to indicate that their pronunciation is modified. In Catalan language (where it is called trenc), French language, and Portuguese (where it is called a cedilha) it is used only under the letter (to form ), 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 language 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 diacritical comma, which is used in the Romanian and Latvian alphabet, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.
There is substantial overlap between the cedilla and a diacritical comma. The cedilla is traditionally centered on the letter, and when there is no stroke for it to attach to in that position, as in Ņ ņ, the connecting stroke is omitted, taking the form of a comma. However, the cedilla may instead be shifted left or right to attach to a descending leg. In some orthographies the comma form has been generalized even in cases where the cedilla could attach, as in Ḑ ḑ, but is still considered to be a cedilla. This produces a contrast between attached and non-attached (comma) glyphs, which is usually left to the font but in the cases of Ş ş Ţ ţ and Ș ș Ț ț is formalized by Unicode.
Under the letter c, the handwritten cedilla developed through three successive forms: a diacritic z, then a z with a cedilla (subscript and sometimes superscript), and finally the modern c with cedilla. By contrast, the evolution of the e caudata is considered unrelated to that of the cedilla.
The tail originated in Spain as the bottom half of a miniature cursive z. The word cedilla is the diminutive of the Old Spanish name for this letter, ceda (zeta).For cedilla being the diminutive of ceda, see definition of cedilla, Diccionario de la lengua española, 22nd edition, Real Academia Española , which can be seen in context by accessing the site of the Real Academia and searching for cedilla. (This was accessed 27 July 2006.) Modern Spanish and isolationist Galician no longer use this diacritic, although it is used in Reintegrationism, Portuguese, Catalan language, Occitan language, and French language, which gives English language the alternative spellings of cedille, from French language "cédille", and the Portuguese form cedilha. An obsolete spelling of cedilla is cerilla. The earliest use in English cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1599 Spanish-English dictionary and grammar.Minsheu, John (1599) Percyvall's (R.) Dictionarie in Spanish and English (as enlarged by J. Minsheu) Edm. Bollifant, London, Chambers' CyclopædiaChambers, Ephraim (1738) Cyclopædia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences (2nd ed.) is cited for the printer-trade variant C-cedilla in use in 1738. Its use in English is not universal and applies to loan words from French language and Portuguese such as façade, limaçon and cachaça (often typed facade, limacon and cachaca because of lack of ç keys on English-language keyboards).
With the advent of typeface modernism, the calligraphic nature of the cedilla was thought somewhat jarring on sans-serif typefaces, and so some designers instead substituted a comma design, which could be made bolder and more compatible with the style of the text. This reduces the visual distinction between the cedilla and the diacritical comma.
Thus ceo and czo were read /tso/: the diacritic e and z prevented the reading /ko/.
This latter notation appears in French as early as the first literary manuscript in the French language, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia (dated to 881 and consisting of 29 verses), where it occurs only once, in verse 21.
According to Greimas (2001), the neuter demonstrative ço appears in the Sequence of Saint Eulalia.
However, Greimas gives only the form ço for this text, although the manuscript, rediscovered in the 19th century, contains no cedilla in any of its 29 verses. Moreover, the manuscript dates to 881 rather than broadly to the "10th century".
By contrast, analyzes the form czo as follows:
The z in czo is thus interpreted as a diacritic z which, once placed beneath the c, would become the cedilla.
The Visigothic script is indeed thought to have abbreviated this grapheme around the 11th century in Spain. Initially, the c was written above the z in its form ʒ; later, the c regained its full size while was reduced to a subscript sign. Thus, the Spanish word lanʒa /lantsa/ ("lance") came to be written lança. The usefulness of such a sign, and an early attempt to systematize the notation of /ts/, led (depending on scribes) to the extension of the cedilla before the vowels i and e ( çinco, "five"). This was later regarded as a form of hypercorrection, since c alone was sufficient ( cinq and çinq are pronounced identically).
Maria Selig confirms this Visigothic origin:
Selig also notes that the diacritic spread across Europe more slowly than its phonetic value, and was in some cases "reappropriated" by different languages to represent sounds unrelated to its original function.
In French, according to Jean Dubois, the cedilla appears "as early as the 8th century in Visigothic manuscripts, but was little used by scribes, who preferred to add an extra letter to indicate the sibilant sound of c (they wrote receut, aperceut)".
Jean Dubois (2026). 203532047X, Larousse. 203532047X
Accordingly, in the manuscripts of The Song of Roland, the cedilla is not used, although modern transcriptions add it for ease of reading.
This usage continued in manuscripts until the 18th century but did not survive the advent of printing press:
It is noteworthy that this letter, represented here as ę (with an ogonek) or ȩ (with a cedilla), has been preserved in Romance philological transcription, whereas the digraph ae (in its ligatured form æ, known as ash) has been retained in the transcription of Germanic languages. ę was used in manuscripts of Old English written in Insular Irish uncial.
Although this sign is often referred to as a "cedilla", this is an anachronism: it has no connection with the letter z, and it more likely derives from a subscript a.
This cedilla-like mark, whose use varied before the spread of printing, can therefore serve as an indicator for the dating of manuscripts by palaeography. For example, according to the Dictionnaire de paléographie by Louis Mas Latrie (1854), "manuscripts in which one finds the e cedilla rather than œ must be placed between five and seven hundred years ago ", that is, between 1150 and 1350:
The cedilla in French, in the form of c-cedilla, was first explicitly advocated in 1529 by the same author, in the introduction to his book , published in 1529 (with printing privilege dated ).
Its subtitle clearly expresses its purpose: l'art et la science de la due et vraie proportion de la lettre ("the art and science of the proper and true proportion of the letter"). This work is, moreover, the first typographical treatise written in French:
This defense of the cedilla was not immediately put into practice. In Tory's system, the cedilla was intended to mark /s/ (and no longer /ts/, since this phoneme had simplified in French by the 13th century and in Old Castilian between the 14th and 16th centuries). The cedilla formed part of Geoffroy Tory's typographical innovations (along with the comma and the apostrophe), whose aim was likely to facilitate the commercialization of the first books printed in French rather than Latin.
He used the cedilla in French for the first time in Le sacre et coronnement de la royne by Guillaume Bochetel, published in 1531.
According to many authors, Tory generalized the use of c-cedilla in his edition of L'Adolescence Clémentine by Clément Marot, the fourth edition of the work, published in 1533. The book had first appeared on 12 August 1532 in Paris, published by Roffet, without cedillas, and then on 7 June 1533 by Tory, this time with cedillas.
In reality, Tory had already introduced the cedilla at the beginning of 1530 in his pamphlet Le sacre et le coronnement de la Royne, imprime par le commandement du Roy nostre Sire, where it appears three times, in the words façon, commença, and Luçon.
The 1533 edition of L'Adolescence Clémentine nevertheless represents the first true generalization of the cedilla in a work that enjoyed success and was intended for a relatively large print run for the period. Tory justified the use of the cedilla in the introduction to this edition using the same arguments already advanced in Champ fleury:
The practical application of Tory's orthographic system is irregular: apostrophes are missing in par faulte dadvis, and oddly placed in combien q'uil—likely a typographical error. As Bernard observes, this was the first work in which Tory applied his orthographic system, and the inexperience of his compositors is evident in the mistakes made by omission or transposition.
From this point onward, the cedilla was adopted by all printers. Before this, supporters of etymological orthography wrote francoys. Usage initially remained unstable. For example, in the Œuvres poétiques of Louise Labé (published by Jean de Tournes in 1555), one finds the cedilla in aperçu but not in perſa (modern perça), which is instead written with an s to avoid perca.
From there, the use of the " c with a tail" (its earliest name) spread throughout France, but it was not until the 17th century that its use became truly common.
In Spanish language, the cedilla was abandoned in the 18th century ( ç being replaced by z or simple c before e and i), while /ts/ had simplified to /s/ between the 14th and 16th centuries and then to /θ/ in the 17th century. Other related languages (Catalan language, French language, Portuguese) nevertheless retained it.
For Albert Dauzat, "the simplification of an irrational orthography was in keeping with the tendencies of the 17th century, enamoured of clarity and reason. Many writers called for reform ...". The cedilla therefore became a stake in the many projects for orthographic reform of the French language.
In 1663, in Rome la ridicule, Caprice by Saint-Amant, the printer and proofreader for the Elzeviers in Amsterdam, Simon Moinet, used the cedilla under the letter t in French (for example, he wrote invanţion).
In 1766, , preacher to the queen, proposed the use of the cedilla under t to distinguish cases where it is read /t/ from those where it is pronounced /s/:
Ambroise Firmin-Didot, in his Observations sur l'orthographe, ou ortografie, française (1868), proposed to the Académie française a similar reform project aiming to introduce a t-cedilla, ţ (depending on configuration, this may appear as a comma rather than a cedilla), in words where t is pronounced /s/ before i. This would have eliminated a large number of irregularities in spelling ( nous adoptions ~ les adoptions, pestilence ~ pestilentiel, il différencie ~ il balbutie). One would thus have written: les adopţions, pestilenciel (with c preferred in order to agree better with the base pestilence), il différencie, il balbuţie.
In fact, as the author himself notes, the grammarians of Port-Royal Logic had already proposed such an improvement before him (by means of a t with a Underdot: les adopṭions). The project ultimately remained a dead letter.
Moreover, it would have been possible to write the words lança and français using the letter s, since the phoneme /ts/ no longer existed at the time of the loanword of the cedilla. The phoneme had even merged with the other /s/ sounds. However, it was the visual and etymologizing appearance of the word that prevailed. The spelling *lansa would have introduced an awkward alternation: *il lansa ~ ils lancèrent. In other languages, such as Spanish, the spelling of a conjugated verb may be inconsistent: one now writes lanzar, thus "cutting oneself off" from the Latin etymology lanceare, which was more explicitly reflected in lançar (though it reappears in alternation with lance in the present subjunctive).
In addition to maintaining visual etymological coherence, the cedilla also makes it possible, in certain cases, to resolve spelling problems for the sound /s/ derived from /k/. For example, reçu retains a link with recevoir, but above all could not be written in any other way: *resu would be read /ʁəzy/ and *ressu /resy/. The same applies to leçon and other words in which a schwa is followed by the phoneme /s/. In other cases, plain c without a cedilla is retained. The retention of c in such words is explained by an orthographic archaism: the Latin or French etymon remains visible, allowing greater visual coherence by preserving a link between the cedilla-marked derived form and the root from which it originates. In this way, lança and lançons remain clearly and visually connected to the root lanc- /lɑ̃s/ of lancer, lance, etc. Likewise, reçu retains a link with recevoir. Conversely, when the sound /k/ must be obtained before the graphic vowels e, i, and y, a u is used as a diacritic letter following c: accueil.
Used as a diacritic detached from its original c, the cedilla was extended to other letters in other languages from the 19th century onward.
In his article in the Encyclopédie, and later in his Œuvres, the term cedilla was mistakenly interpreted by Dumarsais in French as meaning "little c" rather than "little z", due to the shape of the cedilla:
Friulian uses a cedilled c to represent .
In 2003, the Romanian Academy specified that the letters ș and ț share the same diacritic: a comma placed a short distance beneath the letters s and t, rather than a cedilla.
Because the ISO/IEC 8859-2 and Unicode standards initially treated the Romanian subscript comma as merely a graphic variant of the cedilla, cedilled s (U+015E, U+015F) became widespread in computing, especially since it also exists in Turkish (allowing a single ISO character set for both languages). Cedilled t (U+0162, U+0163), however, has most often continued to be represented as a t with a subscript comma, primarily for aesthetic reasons. As a result, modern fonts most often display an s with a cedilla and a t with a cedilla shaped like a comma.
Unicode now distinguishes the two characters, as shown in the illustration. The characters named "Latin capital letter S with comma below" (U+0218) and "Latin small letter s with comma below" (U+0219), as well as "Latin capital letter T with comma below" (U+021A) and "Latin small letter t with comma below" (U+021B), are preferred in careful typography.
For alphabetical sorting, the two Romanian letters with subscript comma (or cedilla) are considered distinct letters, ordered after s and t.
Both letters have been used in the orthography of Turkish language since the romanization adopted on November 1, 1928. They are regarded as distinct letters, ordered respectively after c and s, and not as variants of those letters. The use of ç for may have been inspired by Albanian usage, while ş appears to follow Romanian practice.
The Turkmen alphabet, adopted in 1991 following the independence of Turkmenistan, is largely inspired by Western alphabets, and particularly by Turkish. As in Turkish, it includes Çç and Şş .
In Azerbaijani, the cedilla is used, for example, in içmək ("to drink") and danışmak ("to consult").
In the literary Tatar language (in Kazan), the letter ç is pronounced , while c is . In the western and southern parts of the Tatar-speaking area ( Mişär), ç is , or in the north, and c is . In Siberia, in the eastern part of the Tatar-speaking area, ç is , and c is .
In the current orthography of Albanian, adopted in 1908 at the Congress of Monastir, the letter ç is used to represent .
Latvian language uses a cedilla in the form of a "subscript comma" to indicate the palatalization of the consonants /g/, /k/, /l/, /n/, and /r/, written as ģ, ķ, ļ, ņ, and ŗ. For reasons of legibility, this diacritic is placed above the lowercase g, where it may take several forms, including a curved quotation mark, an inverted comma, or an acute accent. For the uppercase G, where legibility is not an issue, the diacritic remains below: Ģ.
As the pronunciation of r and ŗ is no longer distinguished in standard Latvian, the latter letter was removed from the orthography during the years of Soviet occupation. This reform was generally not accepted by Latvians in exile. After Latvia regained independence in 1991, ŗ was nevertheless not reinstated in the official orthography.
Latvian orthography, derived from German, introduced cedillas and in order to enrich an alphabet of German origin that was insufficient to represent all Latvian sounds. Thus, Ģ, Ķ, Ļ, and Ņ still denote the palatalized equivalents of G, K, L, and N. Until the beginning of the 20th century, Latvian orthography was highly irregular.
In Kurdish language, examples include şer ("war") and piçûk ("small").
Marshallese (a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in the Marshall Islands) is written using a Latin alphabet that includes several unusual cedilled letters: l, m, n, and o, namely ļ, m̧, ņ, and o̧. Of these, only l and n exist as precomposed Unicode characters (as of Unicode version 4). The others must be composed using the combining cedilla U+0327. Care should be taken not to encode o with cedilla as o with an ogonek ( ǫ).
According to a foundational grammar available online, ļ would correspond to , m̧ to (labialized /m/), ņ to (retroflex /n/), and o̧ to a type of long /oː/. These values are not confirmed by a study of Marshallese phonology, which does not discuss the current orthography.
Nasalized vowels marked with a cedilla include:
Alan Timberlake uses the cedilla to indicate consonant palatalization in a Russian grammar published in 2004: p̧ b̧ ţ ḑ ķ ģ ç̆ ʒ̧̆ ş ş̆ x̧ v̧ z̧ z̧̆ m̧ ņ ļ ŗ.
However, national variants of ISO 646 used the few non-invariant positions of the standard to encode additional punctuation marks and diacritics:
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