Hard and Soft C - Other Languages

Other Languages

All modern Romance languages make the hard/soft distinction with ⟨c⟩, except a few that have undergone spelling reforms such as Ladino and Haitian Creole. Some non-Romance languages like German, Danish and Dutch use ⟨c⟩ in loanwords and also make this distinction. The soft ⟨c⟩ pronunciation, which occurs before ⟨i⟩, ⟨e⟩ and ⟨y⟩, is:

1. /tʃ/ in Italian and Romanian;
2. /s/ in English, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Latin American Spanish, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages
3. /θ/ in European Spanish.
4. /ts/ in words loaned into German. This was also the pronunciation in Old Spanish, Old French, and other historical languages where it is now pronounced /s/.

The hard ⟨c⟩ occurs in all other positions and represents /k/ in all these aforementioned languages.

A number of orthographies don't make hard/soft distinction. The ⟨c⟩ is always hard in Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic – but is always soft in Slavic languages, Hungarian, and the Hanyu Pinyin transcription system of Mandarin Chinese, where it represents /ts/ or /tsʰ/.

In Italian and Romanian, the orthographic convention for representing /k/ before front vowels is to add ⟨h⟩ (Italian chiaro, 'clear'). ⟨qu⟩ is used to accomplish the same purpose in Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

In French, Catalan,, Portuguese, and Old Spanish a cedilla is used to indicate a soft /s/ pronunciation when it would otherwise seem to be hard. (French garçon, 'boy'; Portuguese coração, 'heart'; Catalan caçar, 'to hunt'). Spanish is similar, though ⟨z⟩ is used instead of ⟨ç⟩ (e.g. corazón 'heart').

Swedish has a similar phenomenon with hard and soft ⟨k⟩: this results from a similar historical palatalization development. Soft ⟨k⟩ is typically a palatal or an alveolo-palatal, and occurs before not only ⟨i⟩, ⟨e⟩ and ⟨y⟩, but also ⟨j⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩.