Â

Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the French, Friulian, Frisian, Inari Sami, Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Walloon, and Welsh alphabets.

Usage in various languages

Berber languages

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

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:

Schrøter 1817 Modern Faroese
Brinhlid situr uj gjiltan Stouli,
Teâ hit veâna Vujv,
Drevur hoon Sjúra eâv Nordlondun
Uj Hildarhaj tiil sujn.		 Brynhild situr í gyltum stóli,
tað hitt væna vív,
dregur hon Sjúrða av Norðlondum
í Hildarheið til sín.

 is not used in modern Faroese, however.

French

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

Friulian

 is used to represent the /ɑː/ sound.

Inari Sami

 is used to represent the /ɐ/ sound.

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/. This sound 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 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-understand)

Serbo-Croatian

In all standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian, "â" is not a letter, but simply an "a" with the circumflex, denoting length of the vowel. It is used only occasionally, in order to disambiguate homographs which differ only by syllable length. Such situation is most common in (but not exclusive to) the plural genitive case, thus the name "genitive sign" for the circumflex. For example, "Ja sam sâm" (English: I am alone)

Vietnamese

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

Turkish

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

Ukrainian

 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 when two occurrences of the letter a combine to produce one long stressed vowel. This 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, e.g., 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 also the third person non-past singular of the verbal noun mynd "go". This distinguishes it in writing from similarly pronounced a "and; whether; who, which, that".

Character mappings

Character  â
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 194 U+00C2 226 U+00E2
UTF-8 195 130 C3 82 195 162 C3 A2
Numeric character reference   â â
Named character reference  â
ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/14/15/16 194 C2 226 E2
EBCDIC 98 62 66 42

TeX and LaTeX

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

See also

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