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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, TatarTatar language Tatar tele Tatarca is a very ancient Turkic language belonging to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. It is the official language of the Republic of Tatarstan, and is also spoken in European part of Russia, Siberia as, TurkmenTurkmen (, ISO 639-1: tk, ISO 639-2: tuk) is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. Turkmen is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 3,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran (2,, KurdishGeographic distribution The Kurdic languages (also called dialects of Kurdish) are spoken in the region loosely called Kurdistan including Kurdish populations in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Classification and related languages The Kurdic langua (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 RomanizationA Romanization or Latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Latin alphabet, where the original word or language used a writing system other than the Roman alphabet. Three methods may be used to carry out Romanization: translite of ArabicArabic is a Semitic language, fairly closely related to, for instance, the Hebrew language and the Aramaic language, spoken throughout the Arab world and widely known outside it. It has been a literary language for over 1500 years, and is the liturgical l. As a phonetic symbol, [ç] is the International Phonetic AlphabetThis article is about the alphabet officially used in linguistics. The NATO phonetic alphabet ("alpha bravo") has been informally and nonstandardly called the International Phonetic Alphabet as well. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alpha symbol for the voiceless palatal fricativeThe voiceless palatal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is c, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is C. Features of this consonant: Its manne.
And the s-cedilla, s, 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 Turkish alphabet both Ç and S are considered separate letters, not variants of C and S.
A few words used in English have a ç, almost all of which are borrowings from French. The most common English word taking a cedilla is probably "façade".
The Romanian Ș (ș) seemingly resembles the Turkish s cedilla, but it is actually a comma (Virgula). While it is common in online contexts (such as Wikipedia) to use S/s and T/t 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).
Unicode considers Romanian S with comma (Virgula) below to be a glyph variant of S with cedilla (compare Han unification, where similar-looking Chinese characters from various languages or countries were merged), and intends the same character to be used for Turkish s-cedilla and Romanian s-comma, and "t-cedilla" to be used for Romanian t-comma. Since no European language has a letter t with cedilla, the letter looks like a t with a comma in many fonts, suitable for writing Romanian. Only later (in version 3.0) did Unicode add separate code points for s with comma and t with comma; these points have the comment "Romania, when distinct comma below form is required", while the code points with cedilla have the comments "this character is used in both Turkish and Romanian data" and "a glyph variant with comma below is preferred for Romanian" (similar to how LATIN SMALL LETTER D WITH CARON d is marked "the form using apostrophe is preferred in typesetting").
It is, therefore, debatable whether S/s and T/t are "wrong"; if text is marked as being in the Romanian language, glyphs appropriate for Romanian should be chosen, similar to how language determines the glyph shape for a given Chinese/ Japanese/ Korean character (see the example at Han unification) or whether a mark above a vowel is more slanted ( acute) or closer to vertical (Polish kreska).
The diacritics on the Latvian letters g, k, l, n, and formerly r are considered by some to be cedillas and others to be commas.
See also: ogonek
Diacritics