Â

Latin letter A with circumflex

Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Inari Sami, Skolt Sami, Romanian, and Vietnamese alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Friulian, Frisian, Portuguese, Turkish, Walloon, and Welsh languages as a variant of letter “a”.

Berber languages

"â" can be used in Berber Latin alphabet to represent [ʕ].

Emilian-Romagnol

 is used to represent [aː] in Emilian dialects, as in Bolognese câna [kaːna] "cane".

Faroese

Johan Henrik Schrøter, who translated the Gospel of Matthew into Faroese in 1823, used â to denote a non-syllabic a, as in the following example:

Schrøter 1817	Modern Faroese
Brinhlid situr uj gjiltan Stouli, Teâ hit veâna Vujv, Drevur hoon Sjúra eâv Nordlondun Uj Hildarhaj tiil sujn.	Brynhild situr í gyltum stóli, tað hitt væna vív, dregur hon Sjúrða av Norðlondum í Hildarheið til sín.

 is not used in modern Faroese, however.

French

⟨â⟩, in the French language, is used as the letter ⟨a⟩ with a circumflex accent. It is a remnant of Old French, where the vowel was followed, with some exceptions, by the consonant ⟨s⟩. For example, the modern form bâton (English: stick) comes from the Old French baston. Phonetically, ⟨â⟩ is traditionally pronounced as /ɑ/, but is nowadays rarely distinguished from /a/ in many dialects such as in Parisian French. However, the traditional ⟨â⟩ is still pronounced this way in Québecois French or Canadian French, which is known to resemble the phonetics of the Old French accent, and is widely spoken by French Canadians, the majority of whom live in the province of Québec.

In Maghreb French, ⟨â⟩ is used to transcribe the Arabic consonant ⟨ع⟩ /ʕ/, whose pronunciation is close to a non-syllabic [ɑ̯].

Friulian

 is used to represent the /ɑː/ sound.

Inari Sami

 is used to represent the /ɐ/ sound.

Italian

 occasionally used to represent the sound /aː/ in words like amârono (they loved).

Persian

 is used in the romanization of Persian to represent the sound /ɒ/.

Portuguese

In Portuguese, â is used to mark a stressed /ɐ/ in words whose stressed syllable is nasal and in an unpredictable location within the word, as in "lâmina" (blade) and "âmbar" (amber). Where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, such as in "ando" (I walk), the circumflex accent is not used. Â /ɐ/ contrasts with á, pronounced /a/.

Romanian

 is the 3rd letter of the Romanian alphabet and represents /ɨ/, which is also represented in Romanian as letter î. The difference between the two is that â is used in the middle of the word, as in "România", while î is used at the beginning and at the ends: "înțelegere" (understanding), "a urî" (to hate). A compound word starting with the letter î will retain it, even if it goes in the middle of the word: "neînțelegere" (misunderstanding). However, if a suffix is added, the î changes into â, as in the example: "a urî" (to hate), "urât" (hated).

Russian

 is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Russian transliteration as the letter Я.

Serbo-Croatian

In all standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian, "â" is not a letter but simply an "a" with the circumflex that denotes vowel length. It is used only occasionally and then disambiguates homographs, which differ only by syllable length. That is most common in the plural genitive case and so it is also called "genitive sign": "Ja sam sâm" (English: I am alone).

Turkish

 is used to indicate the consonant before "a" is palatalized, as in "kâr" (profit). It is also used to indicate /aː/ in words for which the long vowel changes the meaning, as in "adet" (pieces) and "âdet" (tradition) / "hala" (aunt) and "hâlâ" (still).

Vietnamese

 is the 3rd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ɜ/. â /ɜ/ is a higher vowel than plain a /ɑ/. In Vietnamese phonology, diacritics can be added to form five forms to represent five tones of â:

• Ầ ầ
• Ẩ ẩ
• Ẫ ẫ
• Ấ ấ
• Ậ ậ

Ukrainian

Much like in Russian, Â is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Ukrainian transliteration as the letter Я.

Welsh

In Welsh, â is used to represent long stressed a [aː] when, without the circumflex, the vowel would be pronounced as short [a], e.g., âr [aːr] "arable", as opposed to ar [ar] "on", or gwâr [ɡwaːr] "civilised, humane", rather than gwar [ɡwar] "nape of the neck". It is often found in final syllables in which the letters occur twice a and combine to produce a long stressed vowel. That commonly happens when a verb stem ending in stressed a combines with the nominalising suffix -ad, as in caniata- + -ad giving caniatâd [kanjaˈtaːd] "permission", and also when a singular noun ending in a receives the plural suffix -au, as in drama + -au becoming dramâu [draˈmaɨ, draˈmai] "dramas, plays". It is also useful in writing borrowed words with final stress, e.g. brigâd [brɪˈɡaːd] "brigade".

A circumflex is also used in the word â, which is both a preposition, meaning "with, by means of, as", and the third person non-past singular of the verbal noun mynd "go". That distinguishes it in writing from the similarly pronounced a, meaning "and; whether; who, which, that".

Character mappings

Character information

Preview	Â		â
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX		LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	194	U+00C2	226	U+00E2
UTF-8	195 130	C3 82	195 162	C3 A2
Numeric character reference	Â	Â	â	â
Named character reference	Â		â
ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/14/15/16	194	C2	226	E2
EBCDIC	98	62	66	42

Windows Alt Key Codes

â=Alt+0226, Alt+131 Â=0194

Â	Alt	+	0194
â	Alt	+	0226
	Alt
	Alt

TeX and LaTeX

 and â are obtained by the commands \^A and \^a.

In encoding mismatches

The capital  is sometimes seen on webpages when the page has been saved in an encoding different from that used to view it. The most common text encoding standard is Unicode, which encodes, for example, the copyright symbol © with the hexadecimal bytes C2 A9. In the older ANSI and ISO 8859-1 encoding standards, however, the © symbol is simply A9. If a browser is given the bytes C2 A9, intended to display © per the Unicode standard, but is led to parse the bytes according to one of these older standards, it will interpret the bytes C2 A9 as two separate characters. C2 corresponds to Â, as seen in the chart above, and A9 devolves to the © symbol, so the result seen by the person reading the page is ©—that is, the correct © symbol but with an  prepended. A number of characters—the characters in the Latin-1 supplement—have Unicode encodings that are equal to their ANSI encodings but preceded by the byte C2, so that when any of these characters is viewed in the incorrect encoding, an  will appear before it.

See also

• Circumflex