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Ć

Adventurer · ages 7–10Adapted from Wikipedia
Latin writing character, Ć ć

The letter Ć (small form: ć) is made from the letter C with an acute accent on top. It is used in several languages. It usually stands for the sound [t͡ɕ], the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate. It is also used in phonetic transcription. In Unicode, the capital letter is U+0106 and the small letter is U+0107.

The letter started in the Polish alphabet, where today it appears most often at the ends of words. In the 1800s, Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj adopted it for Croatian. It is the fifth letter of the Polish, Sorbian, and the Latin alphabet of the Croatian language and the Montenegrin Latin alphabet. It is the fourth letter of the Belarusian Łacinka alphabet and the Ukrainian Latynka alphabet. It is also used in Wymysorys, a West-Germanic language spoken in Poland, where it is the fifth letter.

Other alphabets have their own letters for this sound. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet uses Ћ, which is its 23rd letter. Macedonian uses Ќ as a partial match, which is its 24th letter. Most other languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet show this sound with the letters Ч and Ь together. In Russian and Bulgarian, it is written with Ч alone. In unofficial versions of the Belarusian Łacinka and Ukrainian Latynka alphabets, the letter stands for the palatalized alveolar affricate [t͡sʲ].

The letter also appears in some other languages in special ways. In Ladin, it stands for [tʃ] when it comes after [ʃ], as in desćiarié. It is also seen in Banat Bulgarian, where it stands for [kʲ], as in Kaćétu.

This letter is not the same as the Cyrillic letter С́, so the two should not be confused. For the letter's use in the IPA, see Palatal ejective stop. For the musical note, see Helmholtz pitch notation.

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This article is a child-friendly adaptation of the Wikipedia article on Ć, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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