The
circumflex ( ˆ
) is a
diacritic mark used in written
Afrikaans,
Breton,
Croatian,
Esperanto,
French,
Frisian,
Italian,
Romanized Japanese,
Norwegian,
Romanized Persian,
Portuguese,
Romanian,
Serbian,
Slovak,
Turkish,
Vietnamese,
Welsh and other languages. It received its English name from
Latin circumflexus (
bent about)—a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη (
perispōménē).
The circumflex accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it occurred on the accented syllable on long vowels where there was a rise and then a fall in pitch. The term is also used to describe similar tonal accents that result from combining two vowels in related languages such as Sanskrit and Latin. The circumflex is a combination of an acute and a grave accent. Sometimes it takes the form of a tilde or an inverted breve. Since Modern Greek has a stress accent instead of a pitch accent, this diacritic has been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography. The circumflex accent placed over a vowel symbol may also indicate, in some languages, that the vowel or the syllable containing it is to be pronounced in a certain way. For example, in French, the mark ^ indicates that the vowel so marked is both of a certain quality and long. In Albanian, ˘ indicates that the vowel is nasalized and stressed. In Classical Greek, the mark ~ shows that the syllable beneath bears the word accent and is pronounced, according to the ancient grammarians, with a rise and fall in pitch.
The circumflex accent marks a long vowel in the orthography or transliteration of several languages.
The circumflex is also used to indicate the relative height of some vowels
