Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian and Vietnamese 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 the Romanian, Vietnamese, and the pre-1972 Malaysian alphabets, after A.

Ă/ă is also used in several languages for transliteration of the 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 and French but like in Indonesian (using e rather than ă), the vowel 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 that also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă like cărțile /ˈkərt͡sile/ ("the books") and odăi /oˈdəj/ ("rooms"). Another grapheme <a> with diacritic in Romanian is <â>.

Vietnamese

Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ă/. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it (or even no accent at all, since the Vietnamese first tone is identified by the lack of accent marks). See Vietnamese phonology.

  • Ằ ằ
  • Ắ ắ
  • Ẳ ẳ
  • Ẵ ẵ
  • Ặ ặ

Malay

The sound represented in pre-1972 Malaysian orthography by ă is a vowel. It occurred in the final syllable of the root word such as lamă /lamə/ ("long", "old"), mată /matə/ ("eye"), and sană /sanə/ ("there"). The letter was replaced in 1972 with a in the New Rumi Spelling.

Khmer

Ă or ă are used in Khmer romanization, e.g. Preăh Réachéanachăk Kămpŭchéa (Kingdom of Cambodia).

Pronunciation respelling for English

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

Character mappings

Character information
PreviewăĂ
Unicode name LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH BREVE LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH BREVE
Encodingsdecimalhexdechex
Unicode259U+0103258U+0102
UTF-8196 131C4 83196 130C4 82
Numeric character reference&#259;&#x103;&#258;&#x102;
Named character reference&abreve;&Abreve;
ISO 8859-2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16259103258102

See also

Look up ă in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

References

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