Usage
For the fricatives š, ž, and the affricate č only, the caron is used in the Finno-Lappic languages which use the Latin alphabet, such as Estonian, Finnish, Karelian and some Sami languages. In Finnish and Estonian, it is limited to transcribing foreign names and loanwords (albeit common loanwords such as šekki 'cheque'); the sounds (and letters) are native and common in Karelian and Sami. In Italian, š, ž, and č are routinely used much as in Finnish and Estonian to transcribe Cyrillic and other Slavic (except Polish) names, since in native Italian words, the sounds represented by these letters must be followed by a vowel. Other Romance languages, by contrast, tend to use their own orthographies.
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. 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 the United States, because certain atlases use it in romanization of foreign place names. On the typographical side, Š/š and Ž/ž are likely the easiest among non-Western European diacritic characters to adopt for Westerners because the two are part of the Windows-1252 character encoding.
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. It is used in transliterations of Thai to indicate a rising tone.
The caron represents a rising tone in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is used in Americanist phonetic notation as a diacritic to indicate various types of pronunciation.
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