Circumflex - Definition and Overview

The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages.

• In Greek the circumflex occurs (subject to certain rules) on the accented syllable of a word, on long vowels only, where there was a rise and then a fall in tone in Ancient Greek. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, sometimes taking a form similar to a tilde, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent.

• In French the circumflex is used on the vowels â, ê, î ô, and û. It generally marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word – for example, hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest); remark that the former French spelling is current in English. Certain close homophones are distinguished by the circumflex, for instance cote and côte (the former meaning "level", "mark", the latter meaning "rib" or "coast"). ê is pronounced like è. In the usual pronunciations of central and northern France, ô is pronounced like eau; in the usual pronunciations Southern France, no distinction is made between ô and o.

• In Chichewa, ŵ denotes the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA: β), hence the name of the country Malaŵi.

• In Esperanto, it is used on ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, and ŝ. It indicates a completely different consonant from the unaccented form, and is considered a separate letter for purposes of collation. See Esperanto orthography.

• In Norwegian, it is used, with the exception of loan words, on ô and ê, almost exclusively in the words "fôr" (from Norse fóðr), meaning "animal food", lêr, meaning "skin" (Norse leðr) and "vêr" (Norse veðr), meaning "weather".

• In English the circumflex, like other diacriticals, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language; for example, rôle. In Britain in the eighteenth century, which was before the cheap penny post and a era in which paper was taxed, the circumflex was used in postal letters to save room in an analogy with the French use. Specifically, the letters "ugh" were replaced when they were silent in the most common words, e.g., "thô" for "though", "thorô" for "thorough", and "brôt" for "brought" — a precursor of the ways in which trendy young people nowadays abbreviate text messages. This could have led to spelling simplification, but did not.

• In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'.

• In Slovak, circumflex (vokáň) turns the letter "o" into a diphthong ô /u̯o/.

• In Vietnamese, the circumflex helps to distinguish three couples of vowels : &ocirc [o] and o [ɔ], &ecirc [e] and e [ɛ], &acirc [ɐ] and a [ɑ]. It is not a tonal mark, so that you can for instance find association of circumflex and tonal mark, like ệ, which appears in the word Việt Nam

• In Kunrei-shiki romanized Japanese, the circumflex marks long vowels. It is also occasionally used as a surrogate for the macron for marking long vowels in the Hepburn system.

• In Welsh the circumflex (colloquially known as the tô bach -- "little roof") is used on the vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y to differentiate between other words that have the same spelling. The circumflex in Welsh gives a vowel a long sound, for example môr versus mor.

• In Portuguese, it is used on â, ê and &ocirc. It mainly marks the tonic syllable when the vowel is rounded (usually before -m and -n: pântano (bog), câmara (chamber or camera). It is sometimes used to distinguish homophone words, e.g. tem (he has) and têm (they have). The use of circumflex has been much reduced as a consequence of the orthographic reforms.

• in Italian it is used in plurals of singulars ending with ...io, thus ending them with a longer i, in modern Italian this is accomplished with a double or just a single i as in var&icirc, varii, vari ("various", plural of vario).

• in transcription of Akkadian, it is used to indicate a long vowel resulting from an aleph contraction.

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters â, ê, î, ô, û, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the circumflex are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the circumflex as a combining character.

The circumflex receives its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent about) which in turn is a translation of the Greek perispomene (περισπωμένη).

See also

• acute accent
• diacritic marks
• diaeresis
• grave accent
• umlaut