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Ă

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

Ă/ă is also used in the transliteration of Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ in Slovak, Czech, and Swedish.

Romanian

The sound represented in Romanian by ă, although called a schwa (misleadingly suggesting an unstressed lax sound), is a vowel in its own right. Unlike English or French, but similar to Bulgarian and Afrikaans, it 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 which also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă, like in the examples "cărțile" /'kər.ʦi.le/ (the books) and "odăi" /o'dəj/ (rooms).

Vietnamese

Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represent /a/. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may optionally have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it. See Vietnamese phonology.

• Ằ ằ
• Ắ ắ
• Ẳ ẳ
• Ẵ ẵ
• Ặ ặ

See also

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