Usage
In the orthographies of English, and in the Romance languages French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, ⟨c⟩ represents a "soft" value before front vowels and a "hard" value of /k/ before back vowels. The pronunciation of the "soft" value varies by language. In the orthographies of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish from Latin America and southern Spain, the soft ⟨c⟩ value is /s/. In the Spanish spoken in northern and central Spain, the soft ⟨c⟩ is a voiceless dental fricative /θ/. In Italian and Romanian, the soft ⟨c⟩ is . However, there are a number of exceptions in English: "soccer" and "Celt" are words that have /k/ where /s/ would be expected.
All Balto-Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, as well as Albanian, Hungarian, Pashto, several Sami languages, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, and Americanist phonetic notation (and those aboriginal languages of North America whose practical orthography derives from it) use ⟨c⟩ to represent /t͡s/, the voiceless alveolar affricate. In romanized Chinese, the letter represents an aspirated version of this sound, /t͡sʰ/.
Among non-European languages that have adopted the Latin alphabet, ⟨c⟩ represents a variety of sounds. Yup'ik, Indonesian, Malay, and a number of African languages such as Hausa, Fula, and Manding share the soft Italian value of /t͡ʃ/. In Azeri, Kurdish, Tatar, and Turkish ⟨c⟩ stands for the voiced counterpart of this sound, the voiced postalveolar affricate /d͡ʒ/. In Yabem and similar languages, such as Bukawa, ⟨c⟩ stands for a glottal stop /ʔ/. Xhosa and Zulu use this letter to represent the click /ǀ/. in some other African languages, such as Beninese Yoruba, ⟨c⟩ is used for /ʃ/. In Fijian, ⟨c⟩ stands for a voiced dental fricative /ð/, while in Somali it has the value of /ʕ/.
⟨c⟩ is also used as a transliteration of the Cyrillic ⟨ц⟩ in the Latinic forms of Serbian, Macedonian, and sometimes Ukrainian (along with the digraph ⟨ts⟩).
There are several common digraphs with ⟨c⟩, the most common being ⟨ch⟩, which in some languages such as German is far more common than ⟨c⟩ alone. In English, ⟨ch⟩ most commonly represents /t͡ʃ/ (which it invariably has in Spanish), but can take the value /k/ or /ʃ/; some dialects of English also have /x/ in words like loch where other speakers pronounce the final sound as /k/. ⟨Ch⟩ takes various values in other languages, such as:
- /x/ in the West Slavic languages (e.g. Polish, Czech and Slovak)
- /k/, or /x/ in German
- /x/ or /χ/ in Dutch
- /ʃ/ in French and Portuguese
- /k/ in Interlingua and Italian
- /tʂʰ/ in Romanized Mandarin Chinese
⟨Ck⟩, with the value /k/, is often used after short vowels in Germanic languages such as English, German and Swedish (but some other Germanic languages use ⟨kk⟩ instead, such as Dutch and Norwegian). The digraph ⟨cz⟩ is found in Polish and ⟨cs⟩ in Hungarian, both representing /t͡ʃ/. In Old English, Italian, and a few languages related to Italian, ⟨sc⟩ represents /ʃ/ (however in Italian and related languages this only happens before front vowels, otherwise it represents /sk/).
As a phonetic symbol, lowercase ⟨c⟩ is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal plosive, and capital ⟨C⟩ is the X-SAMPA symbol for the voiceless palatal fricative.
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