Â

Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Inari Sami, Romanian, and Vietnamese alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Friulian, Frisian, Portuguese, Turkish, Walloon, and Welsh languages as a variant of letter “a”.

Berber languages

"â" can be used in Berber Latin alphabet to represent [ʕ].

Emilian-Romagnol

 is used to represent [aː] in Emilian dialects, as in Bolognese câna [kaːna] "cane".

Faroese

Johan Henrik Schrøter, who translated the Gospel of Matthew into Faroese in 1823, used â to denote a non-syllabic a, as in the following example:

 is not used in modern Faroese, however.

French

⟨â⟩, in the French language, is used as the letter ⟨a⟩ with a circumflex accent. It is a remnant of Old French, where the vowel was followed, with some exceptions, by the consonant ⟨s⟩. For example, the modern form bâton (English: stick) comes from the Old French baston. Phonetically, ⟨â⟩ is traditionally pronounced as /ɑ/, but is nowadays rarely distinguished from "a" /a/ in many dialects, such as in Parisian French.

In Maghreb French, ⟨â⟩ is used to transcribe the Arabic consonant ⟨ع⟩ /ʕ/, whose pronunciation is close to a non-syllabic [ɑ̯].

Friulian

 is used to represent the /ɑː/ sound.

Inari Sami

 is used to represent the /ɐ/ sound.

Italian

 occasionally used to represent the sound /aː/ in words like amârono (they loved).

Portuguese

In Portuguese, â is used to mark a stressed /ɐ/ in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word, as in "lâmina" (blade) and "râguebi" (rugby). Where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the circumflex accent is not used. Â /ɐ/ contrasts with á, pronounced /a/.

Romanian

 is the 3rd letter of the Romanian alphabet and represents /ɨ/, which is also represented in Romanian as letter î. The difference between the two is that â is used in the middle of the word, as in "România", while î is used at the beginning and at the ends: "înțelegere" (understanding), "a urî" (to hate). A compound word starting or ending with the letter î will retain it, even if it goes in the middle of the word: "neînțelegere" (mis-understanding).

Russian

 is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Russian transliteration as the letter Я.

Serbo-Croatian

In all standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian, "â" is not a letter but simply an "a" with the circumflex that denotes vowel length. It is used only occasionally and then disambiguates homographs, which differ only by syllable length. That is most common in the plural genitive case and so it is also called "genitive sign": "Ja sam sâm" (English: I am alone).

Turkish

 is used to indicate the consonant before "a" is palatalized, as in "istiklâl" (independence). It is also used to indicate /aː/ in words for which the long vowel changes the meaning, as in "adet" (pieces) and "âdet" (tradition) / "hala" (aunt) and "hâlâ" (still).

Vietnamese

 is the 3rd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ɜ/. In Vietnamese phonology, diacritics can be added to form five forms to represent five tones of â:

• Ầ ầ
• Ẩ ẩ
• Ẫ ẫ
• Ấ ấ
• Ậ ậ

Ukrainian

Much like in Russian, Â is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Ukrainian transliteration as the letter Я.

Welsh

In Welsh, â is used to represent long stressed a [aː] when, without the circumflex, the vowel would be pronounced as short [a], e.g., âr [aːr] "arable", as opposed to ar [ar] "on", or gwâr [ɡwaːr] "civilised, humane", rather than gwar [ɡwar] "nape of the neck". It is often found in final syllables in which the letters occur twice a and combine to produce a long stressed vowel. That commonly happens when a verb stem ending in stressed a combines with the nominalising suffix -ad, as in cantiata- + -ad giving caniatâd [kanjaˈtaːd] "permission", and also when a singular noun ending in a receives the plural suffix -au, as in drama + -au becoming dramâu [draˈmaɨ, draˈmai] "dramas, plays". It is also useful in writing borrowed words with final stress, e.g. brigâd [brɪˈɡaːd] "brigade".

A circumflex is also used in the word â, which is both a preposition, meaning "with, by means of, as", and the third person non-past singular of the verbal noun mynd "go". That distinguishes it in writing from the similarly-pronounced a, meaning "and; whether; who, which, that".

Character mappings

Windows Alt Key Codes

â=Alt+0226 Â=0194

^[1]

TeX and LaTeX

 and â are obtained by the commands \^A and \^a.

See also

• Circumflex

References