Â
Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Inari Sami, Romanian, and Vietnamese alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Friulian, Frisian, Portuguese, Turkish, Walloon, and Welsh languages as a variant of letter “a”.
Berber languages
"â" can be used in Berber Latin alphabet to represent [ʕ].
Emilian-Romagnol
 is used to represent [aː] in Emilian dialects, as in Bolognese câna [kaːna] "cane".
Faroese
Johan Henrik Schrøter, who translated the Gospel of Matthew into Faroese in 1823, used â to denote a non-syllabic a, as in the following example:
| Schrøter 1817 | Modern Faroese |
|---|---|
| Brinhlid situr uj gjiltan Stouli, Teâ hit veâna Vujv, Drevur hoon Sjúra eâv Nordlondun Uj Hildarhaj tiil sujn. |
Brynhild situr í gyltum stóli, tað hitt væna vív, dregur hon Sjúrða av Norðlondum í Hildarheið til sín. |
 is not used in modern Faroese, however.
French
⟨â⟩, in the French language, is used as the letter ⟨a⟩ with a circumflex accent. It is a remnant of Old French, where the vowel was followed, with some exceptions, by the consonant ⟨s⟩. For example, the modern form bâton (English: stick) comes from the Old French baston. Phonetically, ⟨â⟩ is traditionally pronounced as /ɑ/, but is nowadays rarely distinguished from /a/ in many dialects such as in Parisian French. However, the ⟨â⟩ is today still traditionally and correctly pronounced in Québecois French or Canadian French, which is known to resemble the phonetics of the Old French accent, and is widely spoken by French Canadians, with the majority living in the province of Québec.
In Maghreb French, ⟨â⟩ is used to transcribe the Arabic consonant ⟨ع⟩ /ʕ/, whose pronunciation is close to a non-syllabic [ɑ̯].
Friulian
 is used to represent the /ɑː/ sound.
Inari Sami
 is used to represent the /ɐ/ sound.
Italian
 occasionally used to represent the sound /aː/ in words like amârono (they loved).
Persian
 is used in the romanization of Persian to represent the sound /ɒ/.
Portuguese
In Portuguese, â is used to mark a stressed /ɐ/ in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word, as in "lâmina" (blade) and "râguebi" (rugby). Where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the circumflex accent is not used. Â /ɐ/ contrasts with á, pronounced /a/.
Romanian
 is the 3rd letter of the Romanian alphabet and represents /ɨ/, which is also represented in Romanian as letter î. The difference between the two is that â is used in the middle of the word, as in "România", while î is used at the beginning and at the ends: "înțelegere" (understanding), "a urî" (to hate). A compound word starting with the letter î will retain it, even if it goes in the middle of the word: "neînțelegere" (mis-understanding). However, if a suffix is added, the î changes into â, as in the example: "a urî" (to hate), "urât" (hated).
Russian
 is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Russian transliteration as the letter Я.
Serbo-Croatian
In all standard varieties of Serbo-Croatian, "â" is not a letter but simply an "a" with the circumflex that denotes vowel length. It is used only occasionally and then disambiguates homographs, which differ only by syllable length. That is most common in the plural genitive case and so it is also called "genitive sign": "Ja sam sâm" (English: I am alone).
Turkish
 is used to indicate the consonant before "a" is palatalized, as in "istiklâl" (independence). It is also used to indicate /aː/ in words for which the long vowel changes the meaning, as in "adet" (pieces) and "âdet" (tradition) / "hala" (aunt) and "hâlâ" (still).
Vietnamese
 is the 3rd letter of the Vietnamese alphabet and represents /ɜ/. In Vietnamese phonology, diacritics can be added to form five forms to represent five tones of â:
- Ầ ầ
- Ẩ ẩ
- Ẫ ẫ
- Ấ ấ
- Ậ ậ
Ukrainian
Much like in Russian, Â is used in the ISO 9:1995 system of Ukrainian transliteration as the letter Я.
Welsh
In Welsh, â is used to represent long stressed a [aː] when, without the circumflex, the vowel would be pronounced as short [a], e.g., âr [aːr] "arable", as opposed to ar [ar] "on", or gwâr [ɡwaːr] "civilised, humane", rather than gwar [ɡwar] "nape of the neck". It is often found in final syllables in which the letters occur twice a and combine to produce a long stressed vowel. That commonly happens when a verb stem ending in stressed a combines with the nominalising suffix -ad, as in cantiata- + -ad giving caniatâd [kanjaˈtaːd] "permission", and also when a singular noun ending in a receives the plural suffix -au, as in drama + -au becoming dramâu [draˈmaɨ, draˈmai] "dramas, plays". It is also useful in writing borrowed words with final stress, e.g. brigâd [brɪˈɡaːd] "brigade".
A circumflex is also used in the word â, which is both a preposition, meaning "with, by means of, as", and the third person non-past singular of the verbal noun mynd "go". That distinguishes it in writing from the similarly-pronounced a, meaning "and; whether; who, which, that".
Character mappings
| Preview | Â | â | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unicode name | LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX | LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX | ||
| Encodings | decimal | hex | decimal | hex |
| Unicode | 194 | U+00C2 | 226 | U+00E2 |
| UTF-8 | 195 130 | C3 82 | 195 162 | C3 A2 |
| Numeric character reference | Â | Â | â | â |
| Named character reference | Â | â | ||
| ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/14/15/16 | 194 | C2 | 226 | E2 |
| EBCDIC | 98 | 62 | 66 | 42 |
TeX and LaTeX
 and â are obtained by the commands \^A and \^a.
In encoding mismatches
The capital  is sometimes seen on webpages when the page has been saved in an encoding different from that used to view it. The most common text encoding standard is Unicode, which encodes, for example, the copyright symbol © with the hexadecimal bytes C2 A9. In the older ANSI and ISO 8859-1 encoding standards, however, the © symbol is simply A9. If a browser is given the bytes C2 A9, intended to display © per the Unicode standard, but is led to parse the bytes according to one of these older standards, it will interpret the bytes C2 A9 as two separate characters. C2 corresponds to Â, as seen in the chart above, and A9 devolves to the © symbol, so the end result seen by the person reading the page is ©—that is, the correct © symbol but with an  prepended. A number of characters—the characters in the Latin-1 supplement—have Unicode encodings that are equal to their ANSI encodings but preceded by the byte C2, so that when any of these characters is viewed in the incorrect encoding, an  will appear before it.[2]
See also
References
- Pyatt, Elizabeth J. "Windows Alt Key Codes". symbolcodes.tlt.psu.edu. Retrieved 2016-11-04.
- "firefox - Special character 'Â' inserted before copyright symbol". Stack Overflow. Retrieved 2020-02-25.