BREVE encyclopedia topics

Length

The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯ which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used this way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek and some other languages, such as Tuareg. (However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only – but all – the long vowels: it is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short.)

In the Cyrillic alphabet, a breve is used for Й (a semivowel I). In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (semivowel U) and in the Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. In the Chuvash a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (Ye-breve).

In Esperanto it is used above the U to form a non-syllabic U, similar to English W in sound.

Other uses

In other languages, it is used for other purposes.

In Romanian it is used above the A to represent the schwa (ə) vowel, as in măr (apple).

G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, Ğ/ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish, but may be pronounced as /g/ in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.

The breve, together with circumflex and horn, are used in the Vietnamese language to represent additional vowels.

The McCune-Reischauer Romanization of the Korean hangul script uses breves, not carons, over o and u to indicate the vowels ㅓ (ŏ) and ㅡ (ŭ).

Note that Pinyin uses the caron, not the breve, to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese.

Encoding breves

Unicode and HTML numeric entities for breve letters

Name	Letter	Unicode	HTML Entity
Latin
A-breve	Ă ă	U+0102 U+0103	Ă ă
E-breve	Ĕ ĕ	U+0114 U+0115	Ĕ ĕ
I-breve	Ĭ ĭ	U+012C U+012D	Ĭ ĭ
O-breve	Ŏ ŏ	U+014E U+014F	Ŏ ŏ
U-breve	Ŭ ŭ	U+016C U+016D	Ŭ ŭ
Azerbaijani, Tatar, Turkish
G-breve	Ğ ğ	U+011E U+011F	Ğ ğ
Vietnamese
A-Sắc-breve	Ắ ắ	U+1EAE U+1EAF	Ắ ắ
A-Huyền-breve	Ằ ằ	U+1EB0 U+1EB1	Ằ ằ
A-Hỏi-breve	Ẳ ẳ	U+1EB2 U+1EB3	Ẳ ẳ
A-Ngã-breve	Ẵ ẵ	U+1EB4 U+1EB5	Ẵ ẵ
A-Nặng-breve	Ặ ặ	U+1EB6 U+1EB7	Ặ ặ
Cyrillic
Short I	Й й	U+0419 U+0439	Й й
U short	Ў ў	U+040E U+045E	Ў ў
A-breve		U+04D0 U+04D1	Ӑ ӑ
Ye-breve		U+04D6 U+04D7	Ӗ ӗ