cediglia

Cediglia, or cedilla in English, is a diacritical mark that takes the form of a small hook or tail placed beneath a letter, most commonly under the letter c to yield the character ç. The cedilla is a typographic device used to alter the pronunciation of the base letter in several languages.

In usage, the cedilla primarily affects the pronunciation of c. In French and Portuguese, ç denotes a voiceless s sound [s] before a, o, or u, where a plain c would typically be pronounced as [k]. The mark also appears in other languages such as Turkish, Albanian, and Catalan, where the letter with a cedilla represents sounds defined by each language’s orthography. The cedilla thus helps distinguish letters that would otherwise share a different pronunciation, contributing to clearer phonetic interpretation.

Historically, the cedilla evolved from scribal practices in medieval manuscripts and became an established diacritic in various national orthographies. The term cedilla derives from the French cédille, meaning “little tail.”

Encoding and typography notes include that the precomposed character ç is encoded in Unicode as U+00E7 (lowercase) and Ç as U+00C7 (uppercase). A combining cedilla exists as U+0327 for use with letters outside the standard Latin set. In digital typography and HTML, the common representations are ç for ç and Ç for Ç.

In summary, the cedilla is a small but important diacritic used across languages to modify the sound of the base letter, most famously transforming c into ç to indicate a distinct pronunciation.