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.
Origin
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,
,
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'
Cyclopædia[Chambers, 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.
C
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 in old Spanish and stems from the letter (the Visigothic form of the letter ), 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 , the voiceless alveolar sibilant, where a "c" would normally represent the "hard" sound (before "a", "o", "u", or at the end of a word) in English and in certain Romance languages such as Catalan language, Galician, French language (where ç appears in the name of the language itself, french language]]), Ligurian, Occitan language, and Portuguese. In Occitan, Friulian, and Catalan, ç can also be found at the beginning of a word ( Çubran, ço) or at the end ( braç).
It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate (as in English " chur ch") in Albanian, Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Friulian, Kurdish language, Tatar language, Turkish language (as in çiçek, çam, çekirdek, Çorum), and Turkmen language. It is also sometimes used this way in Manx language, 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 (as in "
show") in several languages, including many belonging to the
Turkic languages, and included as a separate letter in their alphabets:
In HTML character entity references Ş and ş can be used.
T
Gagauz language 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 language, in the
Manjak language and Mankanya languages, and possibly elsewhere.
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 is usually not pronounced as but as . It has to be distinctly learned that in words such as diplomatie (but not diplomatique), it is pronounced . 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 with the same description, T-cedilla (majuscule: Ţ, minuscule: ţ), is used in Gagauz language. A similar letter, the T-comma (majuscule: Ț, minuscule: ț), exists in Romanian, but it has a comma accent, not a cedilla.
Languages with other characters with cedillas
Latvian
Comparatively, some consider the diacritics on the palatalized Latvian consonants "ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ", and formerly "ŗ" to be cedillas. Although their Adobe glyph names are commas, their names in the Unicode Standard are "g", "k", "l", "n", and "r" with a cedilla. The letters were introduced to the Unicode standard before 1992, and their names cannot be altered. The uppercase equivalent "Ģ" sometimes has a regular cedilla.
Marshallese
In Marshallese orthography, four letters in Marshallese have cedillas: . In standard printed text they are
always cedillas, and their omission or the substitution of
comma below and
dot below diacritics are nonstandard.
, 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 combining cedilla diacritic. Most Unicode fonts issued with 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.
Because of these font display issues, it is not uncommon to find nonstandard ad hoc substitutes for these letters. The online version of the Marshallese-English Dictionary (the only complete Marshallese dictionary in existence) displays the letters with dot below diacritics, all of which do exist as precombined glyphs in Unicode: "ḷ", "ṃ", "ṇ" and "ọ". The first three exist in the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, and "ọ" exists in the Vietnamese alphabet, and both of these systems are supported by the most recent versions of common fonts like Arial, Courier New, Tahoma and Times New Roman. This sidesteps most of the Marshallese text display issues associated with the cedilla, but is still inappropriate for polished standard text.
Vute
Vute language, a Mambiloid language from
Cameroon, uses cedilla for the nasalization of all vowel qualities (cf. the
ogonek used in
Polish language and
Navajo language for the same purpose). This includes unconventional Roman letters that are formalized from the IPA into the official writing system. These include <
i̧ ȩ ɨ̧ ə̧ a̧ u̧ o̧ ɔ̧>.
Hebrew
The ISO 259 romanization of
Biblical Hebrew uses Ȩ (E with cedilla) and Ḝ (E with cedilla and breve).
Saanich
Saanich dialect uses a spacing cedilla as a letter. For fonts created or updated after 2025, a cedilla in the middle of a word should not trigger a word break at the end of a line, to accommodate Saanich.
Diacritical comma
Languages such as Romanian,
Latvian language and Livonian add a comma (virgula) to some letters, such as
ș, which looks somewhat like a cedilla, but is more precisely a diacritical comma. This is particularly confusing with letters which can take either diacritic: for example, the consonant is written as "ş" in
Turkish language but as "ș" in Romanian, and Romanian writers will sometimes use the former instead of the latter because of insufficient computer support.
Adobe Systems names of the Latvian letters ("ģ", "ķ", "ļ", "ņ", and formerly "ŗ") use the word "comma", but in the Unicode Standard they are named "g", "k", "l", "n", and "r" with cedilla. The letters were introduced to the Unicode standard before 1992, and their names cannot be altered. Influenced by Latvian, Livonian has the same problem for "d̦", "ļ", "ņ", "ŗ" and "ț".
The Polish language letters "ą" and "ę" and Lithuanian letters "ą", "ę", "į", and "ų" are not made with the cedilla either, but with the unrelated ogonek diacritic.
Unicode
Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with cedilla" (so called, as explained above) as precomposed characters. In addition, several more letters in language orthographies are composed using the combining character facility ( and ).
In ambiguous cases, typeface designers must choose whether to use a cedilla diacritic or comma-below diacritic for these , leaving it to others to provide the user with a method to achieve the other form (i.e., that relies on the combining character method). Here are three popular faces that demonstrate the choices made:
-
Arial: Ç ç Ḉ ḉ Ḑ ḑ Ȩ ȩ Ḝ ḝ Ģ ģ Ḩ ḩ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ M̧ m̧ Ņ ņ O̧ o̧ Ŗ ŗ Ş ş Ţ ţ Z̧ z̧
-
Times New Roman: Ç ç Ḉ ḉ Ḑ ḑ Ȩ ȩ Ḝ ḝ Ģ ģ Ḩ ḩ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ M̧ m̧ Ņ ņ O̧ o̧ Ŗ ŗ Ş ş Ţ ţ Z̧ z̧
-
Courier New: Ç ç Ḉ ḉ Ḑ ḑ Ȩ ȩ Ḝ ḝ Ģ ģ Ḩ ḩ Ķ ķ Ļ ļ M̧ m̧ Ņ ņ O̧ o̧ Ŗ ŗ Ş ş Ţ ţ Z̧ z̧
In each case, the diacritic displayed with D, G, K, L, N and R is a comma-below; in the other cases it is displayed as a cedilla. It may be that computer fonts are sold in the Romanian and Turkish markets that favour the national standard form of this diacritic.
External links
