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, Vietnamese, and the pre-1972 Malaysian alphabets, after A.

Ă/ă is also used in the transliteration of Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ.

Romanian

The sound represented in Romanian by ă is a mid-central vowel /ə/, i.e. schwa. Unlike in English, Catalan or French but like in 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.

Malay

The sound represented in pre-1972 Malaysian orthography by ă is a vowel. It occurred only in the final syllable of the root word such "mată" /matə/ (eye). The letter was replaced in 1972 with a in the New Rumi Spelling.

Pronunciation respelling for English

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

Character mappings

Character ă Ă
Unicode name LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 259 U+0103 258 U+0102
UTF-8 196 131 C4 83 196 130 C4 82
Numeric character reference ă ă Ă Ă
ISO 8859-1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16 259 103 258 102

See also

Look up ă in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References

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