Ç or ç (C-cedilla) is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turk men, Kurdish, Kazakh, and Romance alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Giuliani, Silurian, Occidental, and Portuguese as a variant of the letter C with a cedilla. It is also occasionally used in Crimean Tatar and in Tajikistan (when written in the Latin script) to represent the sound. It is often retained in the spelling of loanwords from any of these languages in English, Basque, Dutch, Spanish and other languages using the Latin alphabet. It was first used for the sound of the voiceless alveolar affricate in Old Spanish and stems from the Visigothic form of the letter z (Ꝣ). The phoneme originated in Vulgar Latin from the palatalization of the plosives and in some conditions. Later, changed into in many Romance languages and dialects. Spanish has not used the symbol since an orthographic reform in the 18th century (which replaced ç with the now-devoiced z), but it was adopted for writing other languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, represents the voiceless palatal fricative. Usage as a letter variant in various languages In many languages, represents the "soft" sound where a would normally represent the "hard" sound . These include: Catalan. Known as ce trencada ('broken C') in this language, where it can be used before , , or at the end of a word. Some examples of words with are amenaça ('menace'), torçat ('twisted'), xoriço ('chorizo'), forçut ('strong'), dolç ('sweet') and caça ('hunting'). A well-known word with this character is Barça, a common Catalan clipping of Futbol Club Barcelona. French (cé cédille): français ('French'), garçon ('boy'), façade ('frontage'), grinçant ('squeaking'), leçon ('lesson'), reçu ('received' [past participle]). French does not use the character at the end of a word but it can occur at the beginning of a word (e.g., ça, 'that'). It is never used in French where C would denote /s/ (before e,i,y ) nor before h. Occitan (ce cedilha): torçut ('twisted'), çò ('this'), ça que la ('nevertheless'), braç ('arm'), brèç ('cradle'), voraç ('voracious'). It can occur at the beginning of a word. Portuguese (cê-cedilha, cê de cedilha or cê cedilhado): it is used before , , : taça ('cup'), braço ('arm'), açúcar ('sugar'). Modern Portuguese does not use the character at the beginning or at the end of a word (the nickname for Conceição is São,