A caron ( ˇ ) or háček (pronounced ) (also spelled haček or hacek), also known as wedge, inverted circumflex, inverted hat, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate present or historical palatalization, iotation, or postalveolar pronunciation in the orthography of some Baltic, Slavic, Finno-Lappic, and other languages.

It looks similar to a breve, but has a sharp tip, like an inverted circumflex (^), while a breve is rounded. Compare the caron: Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ to the breve: Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ.

The left (downward) stroke is usually thicker than the right (upward) stroke in serif typefaces.

The caron is also used as a symbol or modifier in mathematics.

Name and etymology

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Usage differs as to what name the character is. In the field of typography, the term caron seems to be more popular. In linguistics, the tendency is to use háček.

The term caron is used in the official names of Unicode characters (e.g., "Latin capital letter Z with caron"). Its earliest known use was in computing references in the mid-1980s ^*. Its actual origin remains obscure, but some have suggested that it may derive from a fusion of caret and macron. Though this may be folk-etymology, it is plausible, particularly in the absence of other suggestions.

The name háček appears in most English dictionaries; the OED gives its earliest citation as 1953. In Czech, háček means 'little hook', the diminutive form of hák. The Czech plural form is háčky.

In Slovak it is called mäkčeň (i.e. 'softener' or 'palatalization mark'), in Slovenian strešica ('little roof'), in Croatian and Serbian kvaka or kvačica (also 'small hook'), katus ('roof') in Estonian and hattu ('hat') in Finnish.

Usage

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The caron evolved from the dot above diacritic, which was introduced into Czech orthography (along with the acute accent) by Jan Hus in his De Ortographia Bohemica (1412). Today the caron is also used by the Slovaks, Slovenians, Croats, Bosniaks; Serbs and Macedonians (when romanizing the official Cyrillic); Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, and Belarusians (formerly in the Łacinka Latin alphabet, now only in romanization of the official Cyrillic). The original form still exists in Polish ż.

For the fricatives sh, zh and the affricate ch only, it can be used in those Finno-Lappic languages which use a Latin alphabet, such as Estonian, Finnish, Karelian and some Sami languages. In Finnish and Estonian, it is virtually limited to transcribing foreign names and loanwords, but inherent in Karelian and Sami.

The caron is also used in the Romany alphabet. The Faggin-Nazzi writing system for the Friulian language makes use of the caron over the letters c, g and s.

The caron is also often used as a diacritical mark on consonants for romanization of text from non-Latin writing systems, particularly in the scientific transliteration of Slavic languages (a method used in linguistics, based on the Croatian alphabet). Philologists—and the standard Finnish orthography—often prefer using it to express the sounds that in English require a digraph (sh, ch, and zh) because most Slavic languages use only one character to spell these sounds (the key exceptions are Polish sz and cz). Its use for this purpose can even be found in America, because certain atlases use it in romanization of foreign place names.

It is also used as an accent mark, that is, to indicate a change in the pronunciation of a vowel. The main example is in Pinyin for Chinese, where it represents a falling-rising tone.

The caron is used in Americanist phonetic notation as a diacritic to indicate various types of pronunciation.

Writing and printing carons

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In printed text, the caron combined with tall letters is reduced to a small stroke (as in ť, ď, ľ, Ľ). This only rarely happens in handwritten text. Although the stroke looks similar to an apostrophe, there is a significant difference in kerning. Using apostrophe in place of a caron looks very unprofessional though it can be found on goods produced in foreign countries and imported to Slovakia or the Czech Republic (compare t' and t’ to ť, L'ahko and L’ahko to Ľahko). Foreigners also sometimes mistake the caron for the acute accent (compare Ĺ to Ľ, ĺ to ľ).

Notice that this is not incorrect, but standard in some Finnic languages, such as Võro and Karelian, where an apostrophe indicates palatalization, which is distinct from postalveolar pronunciation. Therefore, Võro L' is correct while Slovak L' is incorrect even if they have the same sound value.

List of letters

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A complete list of Czech and Slovak letters and digraphs with the háček/caron:

• Č/č (pronounced — similar to 'ch' in cheap, e.g. Československo which means Czechoslovakia)
• Š/š (pronounced — similar to 'sh' in she, e.g. in Škoda )
• Ž/ž (pronounced — similar to 's' in treasure, e.g. žal which means "sorrow")
• Ř/ř (only in Czech: special fricative trill , transcribed as in pre-1989 IPA, pronounced roughly as a compound of trilled and , e.g. Antonín Dvořák )
• Ď/ď,Ť/ť,Ň/ň (palatals, pronounced , , , slightly different from palatalized consonants as found in Russian): "Ďábel a sťatý kůň" which means "Devil and beheaded horse")
• (only in Slovak: pronounced as palatal : "podnikateľ" means "businessman")
• Dž/dž (considered a letter in Slovak but a digraph in Czech: pronounced džungle means "jungle" - almost identical to the "j" sound in jungle and the "g" sound in genius. Somewhat rare.
• Ě/ě (only in Czech) indicates mostly palatalization of preceding consonant: "dě", "tě", "ně" is pronounced , , ; but "mě" is , "bě", "pě", "vě" are , ,

A complete list of Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian letters and digraphs with the háček/caron:

• Č/č (pronounced — similar to 'ch' in cheap
• Š/š (pronounced — similar to 'sh' in she
• Ž/ž (pronounced — similar to 's' in treasure
• Ř/ř (only in Upper Sorbian: pronounced ) - similar to 'sh' in she
• Tř/tř (only in Upper Sorbian) - soft 'ts' sound
• Ě/ě (pronounced ) - similar to 'e' in bed

Of the Baltic and Slavic languages, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž. Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Latvian also use the digraph Dž/dž. The Belarusian Lacinka alphabet as well as Bulgarian may also use them at times.

Of the Finno-Ugric languages, Estonian (and transcriptions to Finnish) use Š/š and Ž/ž, and Karelian and some Sami languages use Č/č, Š/š and Ž/ž — DŽ is not a separate letter. (Skolt Sami has more, see below.) The presence of Č is because it may be phonemically geminate: in Karelian, the phoneme 'čč' is found, and is distinct from 'č', which is not the case in Finnish or Estonian, where only one length is recognized for 'tš'. (Incidentally, in transcriptions, the Finnish orthography has to employ complicated notations like mettšä or even the mettshä to express Karelian meččä.) On some Finnish keyboards, it is possible to write these letters by typing s or z while holding right Alt key or AltGr key.

Notice that these are not palatalized, but postalveolar consonants. For example, Estonian Nissi (palatalized) is distinct from nišši (postalveolar). Palatalization is typically ignored in spelling, but some Karelian and Võro orthographies use an apostrophe (') or an acute accent (´). In Finnish and Estonian, š and ž (and in Estonian, very rarely č) appear in loanwords and foreign proper names only and, when not available, can be substituted with 'h', e.g., 'sh' for 'š', in print.

Skolt Sami uses (ezh) to mark the alveolar affricate , thus (ezh-caron) marks the postalveolar affricate . In addition to Č, Š, Ž and , Skolt Sami also uses the caron – inconsistently – to mark the palatal stops and . More often than not, these are geminated, e.g. "to get".

Other uses

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The caron is also used in Mandarin Chinese pinyin romanization and orthographies of several other tonal languages to indicate the "falling-rising" tone (third tone in Mandarin). The caron can be placed over the vowels ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ.

The characters Ě/ě are a part of the Unicode Latin Extended-A set because they occur in Czech, while the rest are in Latin Extended-B, which often causes an inconsistent appearance.

Software

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Unicode

For legacy reasons most letters which can carry carons exist as precomposed characters in Unicode, but a caron can also be added to any letter (often with rather ugly results due to deficiencies in font rendering) by using the character U+030C COMBINING CARON, for example: .

TeX

In TeX, a caron can be inserted using the control sequence \v in text, or \check in mathematics. For example:

$\check{x}$ $\backslash check\{x\}$

Special arrangement is necessary to get the alternate versions of the háček above l, d and t, such as (in LaTeX) \usepackageor \usepackage[czech{babel}.

Macintosh

On Mac OS X's U.S. and Irish Extended keyboard layouts, the caron is typed by pressing option-v followed by the letter you want. The combination shift-option-v will produce a combining caron appended to the previous character.

Microsoft Word

In Microsoft Word, you can usually find letters with carons by clicking Insert → Symbol → Symbols. Select "(normal text)".

XFree86 and X.Org

In recent versions of XFree86/X.Org servers, letters with carons can be typed as a compose sequence c , e.g. pressing compose-key c e yields the letter ě.

Diacritics

Karon | Háček | Hatschek | Háček | Haĉeko | Hatchek | Hacsek | Háček | Strešica | Caron