cedille

The cedilla is a diacritical mark that appears as a small tail beneath the letter c, producing the grapheme ç (lowercase) or Ç (uppercase). It is used in several languages that employ the Latin alphabet to modify the pronunciation of the letter c.

The term cedilla comes from the French word cédille, meaning “little c.” The mark developed in medieval scribal practice to distinguish a soft s-like sound from a hard k sound in certain phonetic environments and languages.

In modern usage, the cedilla most often signals a /s/ sound for the letter c before a, o, or u in languages such as French and Portuguese. For example, French words like garçon and façade use ç to convey /s/, where a plain c would be pronounced as /k/. Portuguese similarly uses ç to denote /s/ before those vowels, as in coração. The cedilla also appears in Catalan and Occitan, among other languages that adopted the mark. In Turkish, ç is treated as a separate letter in the alphabet and represents /tʃ/, rather than being a mere diacritic on c.

Typographically, the character can be encoded in Unicode as precomposed ç (U+00E7) and Ç (U+00C7) or as a base letter c with a combining cedilla (U+0327). Fonts vary in how the cedilla sits under the letter, and some orthographies prefer to avoid diacritics in uppercase forms.

Overall, the cedilla is a historical and typographic tool used to indicate a distinct pronunciation of the letter c in multiple languages.