cirkumflexa

Cirkumflexa, commonly known as the circumflex, is a diacritic mark used in several writing systems. It appears as a small inverted V or caret (ˆ) placed above a vowel. The name derives from Latin circumflexus, meaning bent around. In orthographic practice, the cirkumflexa often signals a change in vowel quality, length, or a historical loss of a consonant, though its exact function varies by language.

Languages that employ the cirkumflexa include French, Romanian, and Portuguese. In French, the accent circonflexe over vowels such as ê or â often signals a former s after the vowel (forêt from forest) and can indicate a closed or more tense vowel quality. Romanian uses letters such as â and î with a circumflex to denote specific phonemes; Portuguese uses â, ê, and ô to indicate stressed or closed vowels and to distinguish meaning in certain words. In other languages the circunflexa may mark stress or lexical tone, depending on the orthographic tradition.

Typography and encoding: In Unicode, the circumflex letters are encoded as separate characters, for example U+00E2 (â), U+00EA (ê), U+00EE (î), U+00F4 (ô), U+00FB (û). The cirkumflexa can also appear as part of ligatures or combining marks in various fonts. In mathematics and statistics, the circumflex (hat) is used above a letter to denote estimators, Fourier transforms, or other context-dependent meanings.

See also: diacritic marks, caret, hat (mathematics).