Â

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Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Friulian, Romanian, Vietnamese, French, Galician, Portuguese, Frisian, Welsh, Turkish, and Walloon alphabets.

Usage in various languages

Berber languages

"â" can be used in Berber Latin alphabet to represent [ʕ].

Croatian and Serbian

"â" is not a letter in the Croatian and Serbian, but simply an "a" with the circumflex. It is used only occasionally, in order to disambiguate homographs which differ only by length of the vowel. Such situation is most common in (but not exclusive to) the plural genitive case, thus the name "genitive sign" for the circumflex and is pronounced as a long vowel. For example, "Ja sam sâm." (English: I am alone.)

Faroese

Johan Henrik Schrøter, who translated the Gospel of Matthew into Faroese in 1823, used â to denote a non-syllabic a, as in the following example:

 is not used in modern Faroese, however.

French

 in the French language is used as the letter "a" with a circumflex accent. It is a remnant of old French, where a vowel was followed, with some exceptions, by the consonant "s". For example, the modern form bâton (English: stick) comes from the ancient French baston. Phonetically, "â" is pronounced as /ɑ/, but only in dialects that distinguish it from /a/.

Friulian

 is used to represent the /ɑː/ sound.

Romanian

 is the 3rd letter of the Romanian alphabet and represents /ɨ/. This sound is also represented in Romanian as letter î.

Vietnamese

 is the 3rd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ɜ/. In Vietnamese phonology, diacritics can be added to form the following five forms to represent five tones of â.

• Ầ ầ
• Ẩ ẩ
• Ẫ ẫ
• Ấ ấ
• Ậ ậ

Turkish

 is used to indicate the consonant before "a" is palatalised, as in "kâğıt" (paper). It is also used to indicate /aː/ in words where the long vowel changes the meaning, as in "adet" (pieces) and "âdet" (tradition).

Ukrainian

 is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Ukrainian transliteration as the letter Я.

Portuguese

 is used for /ɐ/ in stressed syllables (/ɐ̃/ when it is before the nasal consonants m and n).

Welsh

 is used to represent the /ɑː/ sound.

Character mappings

TeX and LaTeX

 and â are obtained by the commands \^A and \^a.

See also

• Circumflex

External links

• Omniglot - writing systems & languages of the world
  • Friulian language
  • Romanian language
  • Vietnamese language