Ă

Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian language and Vietnamese language orthographies. In Romanian, it is used to represent the mid-central unrounded vowel, while in Vietnamese it represents the short a sound. It is the second letter of both the Romanian and the Vietnamese alphabets, after A.

Ă/ă is also used in the transliteration of Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ in the Slovak, Czech, Romanian, Estonian, Swedish and Finnish^[1] languages.

Romanian

The sound represented in Romanian by ă, although called a schwa (misleadingly suggesting an unstressed lax sound), is a vowel in its own right. Unlike English, Catalan or French, but similar to Bulgarian and Afrikaans, it can be stressed. There are words in which it is the only vowel, such as "măr" /mər/ (apple) or "văd" /vəd/ (I see). Additionally, some words which also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă, like in the examples "cărțile" /ˈkərt͡sile/ (the books) and "odăi" /oˈdəj/ (rooms).

Vietnamese

Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /a/. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may optionally have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it. See Vietnamese phonology.

• Ằ ằ
• Ắ ắ
• Ẳ ẳ
• Ẵ ẵ
• Ặ ặ

Pronunciation respelling for English

In some systems for Pronunciation respelling for English including American Heritage Dictionary notation, this represents the so-called "short A" sound, IPA: /æ/.

See also

• A with breve (Cyrillic), Cyrillic letter а with breve, visually indistinguishable
• Breve

References