Circumflex

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

In French the circumflex is used on the vowels â, ê, î, ô, and û. It is largely redundant. It marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word. For example, hôpital (hospital), forêt (forest). However, in the case of ô, it changes the value of the vowel: cote and côte are not homonyms (the former means "level", "mark", the latter means "coast").
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 is sometimes used on loanwords; for example, rôle.
In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark a sound similar to Russian 'yery'.
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 (to bach) is used in single-syllable words to show the difference between other words that have the same spelling. The circumflex in Welsh makes a vowel a long vowel (m&#244r/mor).
In Portuguese, it is used on â, ê and &ocirc. It mainly marks the tonic syllable, but sometimes it is used to distinguish homophone words, e.g. tem (he has) and têm (they have).

Using the ISO-8859-1 character encoding, one can type the letters â, ê, î, ô, and û. 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 the Latin circumflexus (bent about).

See also