circunfleja

The circunfleja, or circumflex, is a diacritic mark shaped like a small hat placed above certain vowels in several languages. Its name comes from the Latin circumflexus, meaning “bent around.” The mark signals different phonetic or orthographic features depending on the language, often related to vowel quality, stress patterns, or historical spelling changes.

In French, the circumflex appears on vowels as â, ê, î, ô, û. It frequently indicates that an earlier letter s followed the vowel (for example, forêt from forest) and can also reflect a change in how the vowel is pronounced. In Portuguese, the circumflex on â, ê, ô denotes a closed-mid vowel quality and can help indicate the correct syllable stress in certain words (for example, vôo). Romanian uses â and î as distinct letters, where the circumflex marks specific vowel sounds that are different from a without a circumflex. Vietnamese employs a broad system of diacritic marks on vowels, including circumflexed vowels such as â, ê, and ô, to alter vowel quality and, in combination with tone marks, to express tones and other phonetic distinctions. In other languages, the circumflex may appear mainly in loanwords or in historical spellings.

Typography and encoding notes: In Unicode, vowels with circumflex include â (U+00E2), ê (U+00EA), î (U+00EE), ô (U+00F4), and û (U+00FB). The ASCII caret character ^ is culturally related as a standalone symbol but is not a vowel diacritic. Input methods vary by platform and language.

See also: diacritic, accent marks, orthography.