A cedilla is a hook (¸) added under certain consonant letters as a diacritic mark to modify their pronunciation. The tail is the bottom half of a miniature cursive z or Ezh: Ʒ/ʒ (). The name "cedilla" is the diminutive of the old Spanish name for the letter Z, ceda. An obsolete spelling of "cedilla" is "cerilla" because the letters d and r were interchangeable in 16th-century Spanish.

The most frequent character with cedilla is the ç (c with cedilla). This letter was used for the sound of the affricate [ts] in old Spanish. Spanish has not used it since an orthographic reform in the 18th century.

C-cedilla was adopted for writing other languages, like French, Portuguese, Catalan, unofficial Basque, Occitan, and some Friulian dialects, where it represents /s/ where "c" would normally represent /k/ (for example, while ca is normally pronouced as /ka/, ça is pronouced as /sa/); or Turkish, Albanian, Azerbaijani, Tatar, Turkmen, Kurdish (at least the Mahabad dialect), and some Friulian dialects, where it is used for the sound of the affricate [tS] (the same of English in church). It is also used in a Romanization of Arabic.

In Portuguese, the "ç" character is never used in the beginning of a word, always in the middle and before an "a", "o", or "u". The "ce" and "ci" are already read has /se/ and /si/, so they never have the cedille. To sum up, "ca", "co" and "cu" are read as /ka/, /ko/, and /ku/, respectively; while "ça", "ço", and "çu" has /sa/, /so/, and /su/, respectevely. The cedilla is known in Portuguese has cedilha.

And the s-cedilla, ş, represents /S/ (as in show) in Turkish, Azerbaijan, Tatar, Turkmen, and Kurdish. It is also used in some Romanizations of Arabic, Persian, and Pashto, for the letter ar_r.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ç represents the voiceless palatal fricative.

In the Turkish alphabet both Ç and Ş are considered separate letters, not variants of C and S.

A few words are sometimes spelled in English with a ç, almost all of them borrowings from French, for example façade, soupçon and garçon.

The Romanian Ș (ș) seemingly resembles the Turkish s cedilla, but it is actually a comma (Virgula). While it is common in online contexts to use Ş/ş and Ţ/ţ in writing Romanian, that is only because they look almost right and are much more widely supported in character sets. The orthographically correct characters are Ș/ș and Ț/ț (may not appear on your browser).

Romanian comma below

Unicode distinguishes COMBINING COMMA BELOW from COMBINING CEDILLA, and encodes S WITH CEDILLA for use in Turkic languages and S WITH COMMA BELOW and T WITH COMMA BELOW for use in Romanian. (These characters were added to Unicode 3.0 at the request of the Romanian national standardization body.) The letter T WITH CEDILLA is sometimes used in transliteration of Arabic (as in The Times Atlas of the World).

Romanian authorities consider Ş/ş and Ţ/ţ to be "wrong"; though if text is marked as being in the Romanian language, glyphs appropriate for Romanian should be chosen. The Romanian position is that Romanian data should be migrated from CEDILLA to COMMA BELOW.

See also

• ogonek