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Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian and Vietnamese 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 the Romanian, Vietnamese, and the pre-1972 Malaysian alphabets, after A.

Ă/ă is also used in several languages for transliteration of the 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 and French but like in Indonesian (using e rather than ă), the vowel 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 that also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă like cărțile /ˈkərt͡sile/ ("the books") and odăi /oˈdəj/ ("rooms"). Another grapheme <a> with diacritic in Romanian is <â>.

Vietnamese

Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ă/. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it (or even no accent at all, since the Vietnamese first tone is identified by the lack of accent marks, see also 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 in the final syllable of the root word such as lamă /lamə/ ("long", "old"), mată /matə/ ("eye"), and sană /sanə/ ("there"). The letter was replaced in 1972 with a in the New Rumi Spelling.

Balinese

Ă or ă are used in Balinese romanization, e.g. Kabupatén Tăbăṅan (Tabanan Regency ).

Pronunciation respelling for English

In some systems for Pronunciation respelling for English including American Heritage Dictionary notation, ă represents the short A sound, /æ/.

Character mappings

See also

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

References

1. ^ Dafinoiu, Cristina (2015). "Considerations upon Romanian-Albanian Linguistics Reports in Phonetics and Phonology". Analele Universităţii Ovidius din Constanţa. Seria Filologie. XXVI (1): 60–66. ISSN 1223-7248. Retrieved 3 February 2024.
2. Sala, Marius (2010). "Romanian". Revue belge de Philologie et d'Histoire. 88 (3): 841–872. doi:10.3406/rbph.2010.7806. Retrieved 3 February 2024.
3. Recasens, Daniel (July 2019). "Stressed /e/ Centralization into Schwa and Related Mid Vowel Developments in Catalan and Elsewhere in the Romania". Transactions of the Philological Society. 117 (2): 294–316. doi:10.1111/1467-968X.12159. ISSN 0079-1636.
4. "Modified Letters | Vietnamese Typography". vietnamesetypography.com. Retrieved 2024-02-02.

• Letters with breve
• Phonetic transcription symbols
• Latin letters with diacritics