Ê

Ê, ê (e-circumflex) is a letter in the Friulan, Kurdish and Vietnamese languages. The letter also appears in Afrikaans, French, Portuguese, Welsh, and Albanian dialects as a variant of the letter "e", as well as being used in certain Chinese and Ukrainian transliteration systems. It is also used in the Netherlands but the occurance of the 'ê' in their language is very unique. Most of these words find their origin in french. Some examples are: enquête, fêteren, coûte que coûte, maître d’hôtel, maîtresse, tête-à-tête.

Usage in various languages

Afrikaans

Ê is not considered a separate letter in Afrikaans, but rather, as aforementioned, a variation of the letter "e".

Chinese

In Chinese pinyin ê represents /ɛ/. It corresponds to ㄝ in zhuyin symbol.

Dutch

In Dutch, the ê is also used, this has been taken over from the French language, it changes the pronunciation of e from /ə/ to /ɛ/.

French

In French, ê changes the pronunciation of e from /ə/ to /ɛ/. Diacritics are not usually considered to be letters of the French alphabet.

Friulan

Ê is used to represent the /e/ and /ɛː/ sounds.

Kurdish

Ê is the 7th letter of the Kurdish Kurmanji alphabet and represents /ɛ/.

Portuguese

In Portuguese, ê is used for stressing and is pronounced /e/.

Ukrainian

Ê is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Ukrainian transliteration as the letter Є.

Vietnamese

Ê is the 9th letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /e/ or /ɜ/. In Vietnamese phonology, diacritics can be added to form the following five forms to represent five tones of ê.

• Ề ề
• Ể ể
• Ễ ễ
• Ế ế
• Ệ ệ

Welsh

Ê stands for the long sound of "e" (namely, /eː/) when that letter appears before "l", "n", and "r", and is also used to distinguish certain word pairs, e.g. gem (gem) and gêm (game).

Character mappings

Unicode character set contains 2 precomposed characters as Ế / ế, and Ề / ề, to represent the second and the fourth tone of ê. The first and the third tone of ê have to be represented by combining diacritical marks, like ê̄ (ê̄) and ê̌ (ê̌).

Charset	Unicode	ISO 8859-1, 3, 9, 14, 15, 16
Majuscule Ê	U+00CA Ê latin capital letter e with circumflex (HTML: Ê Ê)	CA
Minuscule ê	U+00EA ê latin small letter e with circumflex (HTML: ê ê)	EA

See also

• Circumflex

External links

• Omniglot - writing systems & languages of the world
  • Kurdish language
  • Vietnamese language

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
Letter E with diacritics
Éé	Èè	Ĕĕ	Êê	Ếế	Ềề	Ễễ	Ểể	Ěě	Ëë	Ẽẽ	Ėė	Ȩȩ	Ḝḝ	Ęę	Ēē	Ḗḗ	Ḕḕ	Ẻẻ	Ȅȅ	Ȇȇ	Ẹẹ	Ệệ	Ḙḙ	Ḛḛ	Ɇɇ
ᶒ	ⱸ
Letters using circumflex accent ( ◌̂ )
Ââ	Ĉĉ	Êê	Ĝĝ	Ĥĥ	Î î	Ĵĵ	Ôô	Ŝŝ	Ûû	Ŵŵ	Ŷŷ	Ẑẑ
Related
History Palaeography Derivations Diacritics Punctuation Numerals Unicode List of letters ISO/IEC 646