Cedilla

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A cedilla (/sɪˈdɪlə/ sih-DIH-lə; from Spanish cedilla, "small ceda", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French cédille, pronounced [sedij]), is a hook or tail (¸) added under certain letters (as a diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modified. In Catalan (where it is called trenc), French, and Portuguese (where it is called a cedilha) it is used only under the letter ⟨c⟩ (to form ⟨ç⟩), and the entire letter is called, respectively, c trencada (i.e. "broken C"), c cédille, and c cedilhado (or c cedilha, colloquially). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute from Cameroon.

This diacritic is not to be confused with the ogonek (◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to the diacrital comma, which is used in the Romanian and Latvian alphabet, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.

There is substantial overlap between the cedilla and a diacritical comma. The cedilla is traditionally centered on the letter, and when there is no stroke for it to attach to in that position, as in Ņ ņ, the connecting stroke is omitted, taking the form of a comma. However, the cedilla may instead be shifted left or right to attach to a descending leg. In some orthographies the comma form has been generalized even in cases where the cedilla could attach, as in Ḑ ḑ, but is still considered to be a cedilla. This produces a contrast between attached and non-attached (comma) glyphs, which is usually left to the font but in the cases of Ş ş Ţ ţ and Ș ș Ț ț is formalized by Unicode.