Ç


Ç or ç is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish, Zazaki, and Romance alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Friulian, Ligurian, Occitan, and Portuguese as a variant of the letter C. It is also occasionally used in Crimean Tatar and in Tajik to represent the sound. It is often retained in the spelling of loanwords from any of these languages in English, Basque, Dutch, Spanish and other Latin script spelled languages.
It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate in Old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter z. The phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives and in some conditions. Later, changed into in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used the symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century, but it was adopted for writing other languages.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

Usage as a letter variant in various languages

In many languages, represents the "soft" sound where a would normally represent the "hard" sound. These include:
In other languages, it represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate :
In Manx, it is used in the digraph, which also represents, to differentiate it from normal, which represents.

In loanwords only

It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate in the following languages:
In Kazakh, as the 4th letter of the Kazakh alphabets based on 2020 amendment of its alphabets, it however represents, this is a little different by other Turkic languages.
It previously represented a voiceless palatal click in Juǀʼhoansi and Naro, though the former has replaced it with and the latter with.
The similarly shaped letter the is used in the Cyrillic alphabets of Bashkir and Chuvash to represent and, respectively.
It also represents the retroflex flap in the Rohingya Latin alphabet.
Janalif uses this letter to represent the voiced postalveolar affricate
Classical Malay uses ç to represent and.

Computer

Input

On Albanian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Italian keyboards, is directly available as a separate key; however, on most other keyboards, including the US and British keyboard, a combination of keys must be used: