A caron or háček ( ), is a

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

mark () placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages, to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation. Typographers tend to use the term ''caron'', while linguists prefer the

Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus *Czech (surnam ...

word '. The symbol is common in the

Baltic Baltic may refer to: Peoples and languages *Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian *Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originatin ...

, Slavic, Finnic, Samic and

Berber Berber or Berbers may refer to: Ethnic group * Berbers, an ethnic group native to Northern Africa * Berber languages, a family of Afro-Asiatic languages Places * Berber, Sudan, a town on the Nile People with the surname * Ady Berber (1913–196 ...

language families. Its use differs according to the orthographic rules of a language. In most Slavic and other European languages it indicates present or historical palatalization (e → ě; [] → []), iotation, or postalveolar consonant, postalveolar articulation (c → č; → ). In Salishan languages, it often represents a uvular consonant (x → x̌; [] → ). When placed over vowel symbols, the caron can indicate a contour

tone Tone may refer to: Visual arts and color-related * Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory * Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color * Toning (coin), color change in coins * ...

, for instance the falling and then rising tone in the

Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

romanization In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and tra ...

of Standard Chinese, Mandarin Chinese. It is also used to decorate symbols in mathematics, where it is often pronounced ("check"). The caron is shaped approximately like a small letter "v". For

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

typefaces, the caron generally has one of two forms: either symmetrical, essentially identical to an inverted

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...

; or with the left stroke thicker than the right, like the usual serif form of the letter "v" (, but without serifs). The latter form is often preferred by Czech designers for use in

, while for other uses the symmetrical form tends to predominate, as it does also among

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

typefaces. The caron is not to be confused with the

breve A breve ( , less often , grammatical gender, neuter form of the Latin "short, brief") is the diacritic mark , shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called , . It resembles the caron (, the wedge or in ...

(, which is curved rather than angled):

Names

Different disciplines generally refer to this diacritic mark by different names. Typography tends to use the term ''caron''. Linguistics more often uses the Czech word . Pullum's and Ladusaw's ''

Phonetic Symbol Guide The ''Phonetic Symbol Guide'' is a book by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw that explains the histories and uses of the symbols of various phonetic transcription conventions. It was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, by the Univ ...

'' uses the term ''wedge''. The term ''caron'' is used in the official names of

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

characters (e.g., ""). The

Unicode Consortium The Unicode Consortium (legally Unicode, Inc.) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization incorporated and based in Mountain View, California, U.S. Its primary purpose is to maintain and publish the Unicode Standard which was developed with the in ...

explicitly states that the reason for this is unknown, but its earliest known use was in the

United States Government Printing Office The United States Government Publishing Office (USGPO or GPO), formerly the United States Government Printing Office, is an agency of the Legislature, legislative branch of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal gove ...

Style Manual of 1967, and it was later used in character sets such as DIN 31624 (1979), ISO 5426 (1980), ISO/IEC 6937 (1983) and ISO/IEC 8859-2 (1985). Its actual origin remains obscure, but some have suggested that it may derive from a fusion of

caret Caret () is the name used familiarly for the character provided on most QWERTY keyboards by typing . The symbol has a variety of uses in programming and mathematics. The name "caret" arose from its visual similarity to the original proofre ...

and macron. Though this may be

folk etymology Folk etymology – also known as (generative) popular etymology, analogical reformation, (morphological) reanalysis and etymological reinterpretation – is a change in a word or phrase resulting from the replacement of an unfamiliar form by a mo ...

, it is plausible, particularly in the absence of other suggestions. A Unicode technical note states that the name "hacek" should have been used instead. The ''

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

'' gives 1953 as the earliest appearance in English for . In

, () means 'small

hook A hook is a tool consisting of a length of material, typically metal, that contains a portion that is curved/bent back or has a deeply grooved indentation, which serves to grab, latch or in any way attach itself onto another object. The hook's d ...

', the

diminutive A diminutive is a word obtained by modifying a root word to convey a slighter degree of its root meaning, either to convey the smallness of the object or quality named, or to convey a sense of intimacy or endearment, and sometimes to belittle s ...

form of (, 'hook')". The name appears in most English dictionaries, but they treat the long mark (

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

) differently. British dictionaries, such as the ''

OED The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

'', ''

ODE An ode (from ) is a type of lyric poetry, with its origins in Ancient Greece. Odes are elaborately structured poems praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structu ...

'', '' CED'', write (with the mark) in the headwords, while American ones, such as the ''

Merriam-Webster Merriam-Webster, Incorporated is an list of companies of the United States by state, American company that publishes reference work, reference books and is mostly known for Webster's Dictionary, its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary pub ...

'', '' NOAD'', '' AHD'', incorrectly omit the acute and write , however, the ''NOAD'' gives as an alternative spelling. In Slovak it is called (, i.e., 'softener' or ' palatalization mark'), in Croatian or ('angled hook' or 'small angled hook'), in Serbian or ('angled hook' or 'small angled hook'), in Slovenian ('little

roof A roof (: roofs or rooves) is the top covering of a building, including all materials and constructions necessary to support it on the walls of the building or on uprights, providing protection against rain, snow, sunlight, extremes of tempera ...

') or ('little hook'), in Lithuanian ('little bird') or ('little

jackdaw Jackdaws are two species of bird in the genus ''Coloeus'' closely related to, but generally smaller than, crows and ravens ('' Corvus''). They have a blackish crown, wings, and tail, with the rest of their plumage paler.Madge & Burn (1994) 136� ...

'), in

Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also

...

('roof'), in Finnish ('hat'), and in

Lakota Lakota may refer to: *Lakota people, a confederation of seven related Native American tribes *Lakota language Lakota ( ), also referred to as Lakhota, Teton or Teton Sioux, is a Siouan languages, Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people of ...

('wedge').

Origin

The caron evolved from the

dot above When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above" (, and "combining dot below" ( which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in a variety of languages. Similar marks are ...

diacritic, which

Jan Hus Jan Hus (; ; 1369 – 6 July 1415), sometimes anglicized as John Hus or John Huss, and referred to in historical texts as ''Iohannes Hus'' or ''Johannes Huss'', was a Czechs, Czech theologian and philosopher who became a Church reformer and t ...

introduced into

Czech orthography Czech orthography is a system of rules for proper formal writing (orthography) in Czech. The earliest form of separate Latin script specifically designed to suit Czech was devised by Czech theologian and church reformist Jan Hus, the namesake of ...

(along with the

) in his ''

De Orthographia Bohemica ''De orthographia bohemica'' () is a Latin language, Latin work published between 1406 and 1412. It is attributed to Charles University rector and reformer Jan Hus. The book codified the Czech language's modern spelling and orthography and had de ...

'' (1412). The original form still exists in Polish '' ż''. However, Hus's work was hardly known at that time, and ''háček'' became widespread only in the 16th century with the introduction of printing.

Usage

For the fricatives ''š'' , ''ž'' , and the affricate ''č'' only, the caron is used in most northwestern Uralic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Karelian, Veps,

Northern Sami Northern may refer to the following: Geography * North, a point in direction * Northern Europe, the northern part or region of Europe * Northern Highland, a region of Wisconsin, United States * Northern Province, Sri Lanka * Northern Range, a ...

, and Inari Sami (although not in

Southern Sami Southern may refer to: Businesses * China Southern Airlines, airline based in Guangzhou, China * Southern Airways, defunct US airline * Southern Air, air cargo transportation company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, US * Southern Airways Express ...

...

and Finnish use ''š'' and ''ž'' (but not ''č''), but only for transcribing foreign names and loanwords (albeit common loanwords such as or 'check'); the sounds (and letters) are native and common in Karelian, Veps, and Sami. In

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

, ''š'', ''ž'', and ''č'' are routinely used as in Slovenian to transcribe Slavic names in the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic languages, Slavic, Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic, Uralic languages, Uralic, C ...

since in native Italian words, the sounds represented by these letters must be followed by a vowel, and Italian uses ''ch'' for , not . Other

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

, by contrast, tend to use their own orthographies, or in a few cases such as Spanish, borrow English ''sh'' or ''zh''. The caron is also used in the Romany alphabet. The Faggin-Nazzi writing system for Friulian makes use of the caron over the letters ''c'', ''g'', and ''s''. The caron is also often used as a diacritical mark on consonants for

of text from non-Latin writing systems, particularly in the

scientific transliteration Scientific transliteration, variously called ''academic'', ''linguistic'', ''international'', or ''scholarly transliteration'', is an international system for transliteration of text from the Cyrillic script to the Latin script (romanization). Th ...

of Slavic languages. Philologists and the standard Finnish orthography often prefer using it to express sounds for which English require a digraph (''sh, ch'', and ''zh'') because most Slavic languages use only one character to spell the sounds (the key exceptions are Polish '' sz'' and '' cz''). Its use for that purpose can even be found in the United States because certain

atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

es use it in romanization of foreign

place name Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of '' toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage, and types. ''Toponym'' is the general term for a proper nam ...

s. On the typographical side, Š/š and Ž/ž are likely the easiest among non-Western European diacritic characters to adopt for Westerners because the two are part of the

Windows-1252 Windows-1252 or CP-1252 ( Windows code page 1252) is a legacy single-byte character encoding that is used by default (as the "ANSI code page") in Microsoft Windows throughout the Americas, Western Europe, Oceania, and much of Africa. Initially ...

character encoding.

Esperanto Esperanto (, ) is the world's most widely spoken Constructed language, constructed international auxiliary language. Created by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 to be 'the International Language' (), it is intended to be a universal second language for ...

uses the

over ''c'', ''g'', ''h'', ''j'', and ''s'' in similar ways; the circumflex was chosen because there was no caron on most Western European

typewriter A typewriter is a Machine, mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of Button (control), keys, and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an i ...

s, but the circumflex existed on French ones. It is also used as an accent mark on vowels to indicate the

of a syllable. The main example is in

for Chinese in which it represents a falling-rising tone. It is used in transliterations of Thai to indicate a rising tone.

Phonetics

The caron represents a rising tone in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

. It is used in the

Uralic Phonetic Alphabet Finno-Ugric transcription (FUT) or the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet (UPA) is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nesto ...

for indicating postalveolar consonants and in

Americanist phonetic notation Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...

to indicate various types of pronunciation. The caron below represents voicing.

Writing and printing carons

In printed Czech and Slovak text, the caron combined with certain letters (lower-case ť, ď, ľ, and upper-case Ľ) is reduced to a small stroke or apostrophe. That is optional in handwritten text. Latin fonts are typically set to display this way by default. In some applications, using the

combining grapheme joiner The combining grapheme joiner (CGJ), is a Unicode character that has no visible glyph and is "default ignorable" by applications. Its name is a misnomer and does not describe its function: the character does not join graphemes. Its purpose is to ...

, U+034F, between the letter and the combining mark, as in t͏̌, d͏̌, l͏̌, may prevent the caron from looking like a small stroke of the canonical characters. In Lazuri orthography, the lower-case ''k'' with caron sometimes has its caron reduced to a stroke while the lower-case ''t'' with caron preserves its caron shape. Although the stroke looks similar to an

apostrophe The apostrophe (, ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: * The marking of the omission of one o ...

, the

kerning In typography, kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between Character (symbol), characters in a Typeface#Proportion, proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result. Kerning adjusts the space between individual le ...

is significantly different. Using an apostrophe in place of a caron can be perceived as very unprofessional, but it is still often found on imported goods meant for sale in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (compare t’ to ť, L’ahko to Ľahko). (Apostrophes appearing as palatalization marks in some

Finnic languages The Finnic or Baltic Finnic languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 million speakers, who live mainly in Finland and Estonia. Traditionally, ...

, such as Võro and Karelian, are not forms of caron either.) Foreigners also sometimes mistake the caron for the

(compare Ĺ to Ľ, ĺ to ľ).

In Balto-Slavic languages

The following are the

and Slovak letters and digraphs with the caron (Czech: , Slovak: ): * Č/č (pronounced , similar to 'ch' in ''cheap'': , which means

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, also known as Czechia, and historically known as Bohemia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the south ...

) * Š/š (pronounced , similar to 'sh' in ''she'': in ) * Ž/ž (pronounced , similar to 's' in ''treasure'': 'sorrow') * Ř/ř (only in Czech: a special voiced or unvoiced fricative trill or , the former transcribed as in pre-1989 IPA:

Antonín Dvořák Antonín Leopold Dvořák ( ; ; 8September 18411May 1904) was a Czech composer. He frequently employed rhythms and other aspects of the folk music of Moravia and his native Bohemia, following the Romantic-era nationalist example of his predec ...

) * Ď/ď, Ť/ť, Ň/ň (palatals, pronounced , , , slightly different from palatalized consonants as found in Russian): , 'The Devil and a beheaded horse') * Ľ/ľ (only in Slovak, pronounced as palatal : , 'businessman') * DŽ/Dž/dž (considered a single letter in Slovak, Macedonian, Croatian, and Serbian, two letters in Czech, pronounced "jungle" - identical to the ''j'' sound in ''jungle'' and the ''g'' in ''genius'', found mostly in borrowings.) * Ě/ě (only in Czech) indicates mostly palatalization of preceding consonant: ** , , are , , ; ** but is or , and , , , are . * Furthermore, until the 19th century, Ǧ/ǧ was used to represent while G/g was used to represent . In

Lower Sorbian Lower may refer to: * ''Lower'' (album), 2025 album by Benjamin Booker *Lower (surname) *Lower Township, New Jersey *Lower Receiver (firearms) *Lower Wick Lower Wick is a small hamlet located in the county of Gloucestershire, England. It is sit ...

and

Upper Sorbian Upper Sorbian (), occasionally referred to as Wendish (), is a minority language spoken by Sorbs in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, today part of Saxony, Germany. It is a West Slavic language, along with Lower Sorbian, Czech, Poli ...

, the following letters and digraphs have the caron: * Č/č (pronounced like 'ch' in ''cheap'') * Š/š (pronounced like 'sh' in ''she'') * Ž/ž (pronounced like 's' in ''treasure'') * Ř/ř (only in Upper Sorbian: pronounced like 'sh' in ''she'') * Tř/tř (digraph, only in Upper Sorbian, soft (palatalized) sound) * Ě/ě (pronounced like 'e' in ''bed'') Balto-Slavic, Croatian, Serbian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian use č, š and ž. The digraph dž is also used in these languages but is considered a separate letter only in Croatian and Serbian. The Belarusian

Lacinka alphabet The Belarusian Latin alphabet or Łacinka (from , BGN/PCGN: , ) for the Latin script in general is the Latin script as used to write Belarusian. It is similar to the Sorbian alphabet and incorporates features of the Polish and Czech alphabe ...

also contains the digraph dž (as a separate letter), and Latin transcriptions of Bulgarian and Macedonian may use them at times, for transcription of the letter-combination ДЖ (Bulgarian) and the letter Џ (Macedonian).

In Uralic languages

In the

...

(and transcriptions to Finnish) uses Š/š and Ž/ž, and Karelian uses Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž. Dž is not a separate letter. Č is present because it may be phonemically

geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

: in Karelian, the phoneme 'čč' is found, and is distinct from 'č', which is not the case in Finnish or Estonian, for which only one length is recognized for 'tš'. (Incidentally, in transcriptions, Finnish orthography has to employ complicated notations like or even the to express Karelian .) On some Finnish keyboards, it is possible to write those letters by typing ''s'' or ''z'' while holding right

Alt key The Alt key (pronounced or ) on a computer keyboard is used to change (alternate) the function of other pressed keys. Thus, the Alt key is a modifier key, used in a similar fashion to the Shift key. For example, simply pressing ''A'' will ty ...

AltGr key AltGr (also Alt Graph) is a modifier key found on computer keyboards. It is primarily used to type characters that are used less frequently in the language that the keyboard is designed for, such as foreign currency symbols, typographic mar ...

, though that is not supported by the Microsoft Windows keyboard device driver KBDFI.DLL for the Finnish language. The Finnish multilingual keyboard layout allows typing the letters Š/š and Ž/ž by pressing AltGr+'+S for š and AltGr+'+Z for ž. In Estonian, Finnish and Karelian these are ''not'' palatalized but postalveolar consonants. For example, Estonian (palatalized) is distinct from (postalveolar). Palatalization is typically ignored in spelling, but some Karelian and Võro orthographies use an

(') or an acute accent (´). In Finnish and Estonian, ''š'' and ''ž'' (and in Estonian, very rarely ''č'') appear in loanwords and foreign

proper names A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa''; ''Jupiter''; ''Sarah (given name), Sarah''; ''Walmart'') as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a Class (philoso ...

only and when not available, they can be substituted with 'h': 'sh' for 'š', in print. In the orthographies of the

Sami languages Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ...

, the letters Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž appear in

, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami. Skolt Sami also uses three other consonants with the caron: Ǯ/ǯ ( ezh-caron) to mark the voiced postalveolar affricate (plain Ʒ/ʒ marks the alveolar affricate ), Ǧ/ǧ to mark the voiced palatal affricate and Ǩ/ǩ the corresponding voiceless palatal affricate . More often than not, they are geminated: ''vuäǯǯad'' "to get". The orthographies of the more southern Sami languages of Sweden and Norway such as

Lule Sami Lule Sámi (, , ) is a Uralic- Sámi language spoken around the Lule River in Sweden and in the northern parts of Nordland county in Norway. In Norway it is especially seen in Hamarøy Municipality (formerly Tysfjord Municipality), where Lule ...

do not use caron, and prefer instead the digraphs ''tj'' and ''sj''.

Finno-Ugric transcription

Most other Uralic languages (including

Kildin Sami Kildin may refer to: * Kildin Island Kildin (also Kilduin; , North Sami: Gieldasuolu) is a small Russian island in the Barents Sea, off the Russian shore and about 120 km from Norway. Administratively, Kildin belongs to the Murmansk Obla ...

) are normally written with

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

instead of the Latin script. In their scientific transcription, the Finno-Ugric Transcription /

however employs the letters ''š'', ''ž'' and occasionally ''č'', ''ǯ'' (alternately ''tš'', ''dž'') for the postalveolar consonants. These serve as basic letters, and with further diacritics are used to transcribe also other fricative and affricate sounds.

Retroflex consonant A retroflex () or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...

s are marked by a caron and an

underdot When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above" (, and "combining dot below" ( which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in a variety of languages. Similar marks are ...

(''ṣ̌'', ''ẓ̌'' = IPA , ),

alveolo-palatal In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (alveolopalatal, ''alveo-palatal'' or ''alveopalatal'') consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simu ...

(palatalized postalveolar) consonants by a caron and an acute (''š́'', ''ž́'' = IPA , ). Thus, for example, the postalveolar consonants of the Udmurt language, normally written as Ж/ж, Ӝ/ӝ, Ӵ/ӵ, Ш/ш are in Uralic studies normally transcribed as ''ž'', ''ǯ'', ''č'', ''š'' respectively, and the alveolo-palatal consonants normally written as Зь/зь, Ӟ/ӟ, Сь/сь, Ч/ч are normally transcribed as ''ž́'', ''ǯ́'', ''š́'', ''č́'' respectively.

In other languages

In the

Berber Latin alphabet The Berber Latin alphabet () is the version of the Latin alphabet used to write the Berber languages. It was adopted in the 19th century, using a variety of letters. History The Berber languages were originally written using the ancient ''Libyco- ...

of the

Berber language The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berber communities, who ar ...

(North Africa) the following letters and digraphs are used with the caron: * Č/č (pronounced like the English "ch" in China) * Ǧ/ǧ (pronounced like the English "j" in the words "joke" and "James") * Ř/ř (only in Riffian Berber: pronounced ) (no English equivalent). Finnish Kalo uses Ȟ/ȟ.

uses Č/č, Š/š, Ž/ž, Ǧ/ǧ (voiced post-velar fricative) and Ȟ/ȟ (plain post-velar fricative). Indonesian uses ě (e with caron) informally to mark the schwa (). Many alphabets of African languages use the caron to mark the rising tone, as in the

African reference alphabet The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organi ...

. Outside of the Latin alphabet, the caron is also used for

Cypriot Greek Cypriot Greek (, or ) is the variety of Modern Greek that is spoken by the majority of the Cypriot populace and Greek Cypriot diaspora. It is considered a divergent dialect as it differs from Standard Modern Greek in various aspects of its ...

letters that have a different sound from

Standard Modern Greek The linguistic varieties of Modern Greek can be classified along two principal dimensions. First, there is a long tradition of sociolectal variation between the natural, popular spoken language on the one hand and archaizing, learned written forms ...

: σ̌ κ̌ π̌ τ̌ ζ̌ in words like ('and'), ('cat').

Other transcription and transliteration systems

The

DIN 31635 DIN 31635 is a (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1935 in Rome. The most important differences from English-ba ...

standard for transliteration of Arabic uses Ǧ/ǧ to represent the letter . '' '', on account of the inconsistent pronunciation of J in European languages, the variable pronunciation of the letter in educated Arabic , and the desire of the DIN committee to have a one-to-one correspondence of Arabic to Latin letters in its system. Romanization of

Pashto Pashto ( , ; , ) is an eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family, natively spoken in northwestern Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. It has official status in Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Khyb ...

uses Č/č, Š/š, Ž/ž, X̌/x̌, to represent the letters ‎چ‎, ‎ش‎, ‎ژ‎, ‎ښ‎, respectively. Additionally, Ṣ̌/ṣ̌ and Ẓ̌/ẓ̌ are used by the southern Pashto dialect only (replaced by X̌/x̌ and Ǵ/ǵ in the north). The latter Š/š is also used to transcribe the phoneme in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform, and the phoneme in

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya language, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew language, Hebrew, Maltese language, Maltese, Modern South Arabian language ...

represented by the letter shin (Phoenician Phoenician sin

and its descendants). The caron is also used in

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means 'Han Chinese, Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin' ...

romanization and orthographies of several other

tonal language Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasi ...

s to indicate the "falling-rising"

(similar to the pitch made when asking "Huh?"). The caron can be placed over the vowels: ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ. The alternative to a caron is a number 3 after the syllable: = , as the "falling-rising" tone is the third tone in

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

. The caron is used in the New Transliteration System of

D'ni ''Myst'' is a franchise centered on a series of adventure game, adventure video games. The first game in the series, ''Myst'', was released in 1993 by brothers Rand Miller, Rand and Robyn Miller and their video game company Cyan Worlds, Cyan, In ...

in the symbol š to represent the sound (English "sh"). A-caron (ǎ) is also used to transliterate the

letter Ъ () in Bulgarian—it represents the

mid back unrounded vowel The mid back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Although there is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid back unrounded vowel between close-mid and open-mid ...

. Caron marks a falling and rising tone (bǔ, bǐ) in Fon languages.

Letters with caron

Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with caron" as

precomposed character A precomposed character (alternatively composite character or decomposable character) is a Unicode entity that can also be defined as a sequence of one or more other characters. A precomposed character may typically represent a letter with a diac ...

s and these are displayed below. In addition, many more symbols may be composed using the

combining character In digital typography, combining characters are Character (computing), characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritic, diacritical marks (including c ...

facility ( and ) that may be used with any letter or other diacritic to create a customised symbol but this does not mean that the result has any real-world application; such customised characters are not shown in the table. There are a number of Cyrillic letters with caron but they do not have precomposed characters and thus must be generated using the combining character method. These are: В̌в̌; Ǯǯ; Г̌г̌; Ғ̌ғ̌; Д̌д̌; З̌з̌; Р̌р̌; Т̌т̌; Х̌х̌

Software

Unicode

For legacy reasons, most letters that carry carons are

s in

, but a caron can also be added to any letter by using the

, for example: b̌ q̌ J̌. The modifier letter version is encoded with . The characters Č, č, Ě, ě, Š, š, Ž, ž are a part of the

Latin Extended-A Latin Extended-A is a Unicode block and is the third block of the Unicode standard. It encodes Latin letters from the Latin ISO character sets other than Latin-1 (which is already encoded in the Latin-1 Supplement block) and also legacy characte ...

set because they occur in Czech and other official languages in Europe, while the rest are in

Latin Extended-B Latin Extended-B is the fourth block (0180-024F) of the Unicode Standard. It has been included since version 1.0, where it was only allocated to the code points 0180-01FF and contained 113 characters. During unification with ISO 10646 for version ...

, which often causes an inconsistent appearance. Unicode also encodes , for example: p̬. A combining double caron was proposed for inclusion in April, 2024.

Notes

References

External links

* * {{Latin script, , caron Greek-script diacritics Latin-script diacritics