C-cedilla

Ç, ç (c-cedilla) is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Portuguese, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish and Zazaki alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Friulian, Ligurian, Occitan, and Portuguese as a variant of the letter C. It is also occasionally used in Crimean Tatar. It is often retained in the spelling of loanwords from any of these languages in English, Dutch, Spanish, Basque and other Latin script spelled languages.

It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate /t͡s/ in Old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter z (Ꝣ). The phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives /t/ and /k/ in some conditions. Later, /t͡s/ changed into /s/ in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used the symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century (which replaced ç with the now-devoiced z), but it was adopted for writing other languages.