Cedilla

◌̧
Cedilla
U+0327 ◌̧ COMBINING CEDILLA (diacritic)
See also
U+00B8 ¸ CEDILLA (symbol)

A cedilla (/sɪˈdɪlə/ sih-DIH-lə; from Spanish cedilla, "small ceda", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French cédille, pronounced [sedij]), is a hook or tail ( ¸ ) added under certain letters as a diacritical mark to modify their pronunciation. In Catalan (where it is called trenc), French, and Portuguese (where it is called a cedilha) it is used only under the letter c (forming ç), and the entire letter is called, respectively, c trencada (i.e. "broken C"), c cédille, and c cedilhado (or c cedilha, colloquially). It is used to mark vowel nasalization in many languages of sub-Saharan Africa, including Vute from Cameroon.

This diacritic is not to be confused with the ogonek (◌̨), which resembles the cedilla but mirrored. It looks also very similar to the diacrital comma, which is used in the Romanian and Latvian alphabets, and which is misnamed "cedilla" in the Unicode standard.