cedilla

Cedilla is a diacritical mark placed beneath a letter, most commonly the letter c, to indicate a modified pronunciation. The sign appears as a small tail or hook under the letter and is sometimes rendered as a comma-like diacritic in some fonts. The term comes from the French word cédille, meaning "little c." The cedilla is used in several languages to alter the value of the base letter; the most familiar example is the letter ç.

In French, Portuguese, Catalan, Albanian, and Turkish the letter ç is widely used. In French, ç signals that c is pronounced as /s/ rather than /k/ before a, o, or u, as in façade or garçon. In Portuguese and Catalan, ç generally represents /s/ before vowels. In Albanian and Turkish, ç denotes /t͡ʃ/ (the "ch" sound) in the orthography of those languages. Some languages historically used cedilla or similar marks to represent other phonetic shifts; Romanian, for example, tends to spell the /t͡ʃ/ sound with other letters rather than a common cedilla.

In modern typography and computing, the cedilla is encoded in Unicode as U+00E7 for lowercase ç and U+00C7 for uppercase Ç. The shape of the mark can vary, but its function remains to modify the pronunciation of the base letter as determined by a language’s orthography.