Ă (upper case) or ă (lower case), usually referred to in English as A-breve, is a letter used in standard Romanian and Vietnamese orthographies. In Romanian, it is used to represent the mid-central unrounded vowel, while in Vietnamese it represents the short a sound. It is the second letter of the Romanian, Vietnamese, and the pre-1972 Malaysian alphabets, after A.
Ă/ă is also used in several languages for transliteration of the Bulgarian letter Ъ/ъ.
The sound represented in Romanian by ă is a mid-central vowel pronounced as /link/, i.e. schwa.[1] [2] Unlike in English, Catalan and French but like in Indonesian (using e rather than ă), the vowel can be stressed.[3] There are words in which it is the only vowel, such as măr pronounced as //mər// ("apple") or văd pronounced as //vəd// ("I see"). Additionally, some words that also contain other vowels can have the stress on ă like cărțile pronounced as //ˈkərt͡sile// ("the books") and odăi pronounced as //oˈdəj// ("rooms"). Another grapheme with diacritic in Romanian is <â>.
Ă is the 2nd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents pronounced as //ă//. Because Vietnamese is a tonal language this letter may have any one of the 5 tonal symbols above or below it (or even no accent at all, since the Vietnamese first tone is identified by the lack of accent marks, see also Vietnamese phonology): Ằ ằ, Ắ ắ, Ẳ ẳ, Ẵ ẵ, Ặ ặ.[4]
The sound represented in pre-1972 Malaysian orthography by ă is a vowel. It occurred in the final syllable of the root word such as lamă pronounced as //lamə// ("long", "old"), mată pronounced as //matə// ("eye"), and sană pronounced as //sanə// ("there"). The letter was replaced in 1972 with a in the New Rumi Spelling.
Ă or ă are used in Balinese romanization, e.g. Kabupatén Tăbăṅan (Tabanan Regency).
In some systems for Pronunciation respelling for English including American Heritage Dictionary notation, ă represents the short A sound, .