Ă

Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian language, Vietnamese language and Chuvash 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 several languages for 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.

• 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 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

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

References