Hard and soft C

Pronunciation of "C" in Latin based orthographies

In the Latin based orthographies of many European languages, including English, a distinction between hard and soft occurs in which represents two distinct phonemes. The sound of a hard often precedes the non front vowels , and , and is that of the voiceless velar stop, (as in car). The sound of a soft , typically before , and , may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English (and not coincidentally also French), the sound of soft is (as in the first and last ⟨c⟩s in "circumference"). There was no soft in classical Latin, where it was always pronounced as .

This alternation is caused by a historical palatalization of which took place in Late Latin, and led to a change in the pronunciation of the sound before the front vowels and Later, other languages not directly descended from Latin, such as English, inherited this feature as an orthographic convention.

A number of two letter combinations or digraphs follow distinct pronunciation patterns and do not follow the hard/soft distinction of For example, may represent (as in chicken), (as in chef), or (as in choir). Other letter combinations that don't follow the paradigm include , , , , , and These come primarily from loanwords. Besides a few examples (recce, soccer, Speccy), fits neatly with the regular rules of : Before , the second is soft while the first is hard. Words such as accept and success are pronounced with and words such as succumb and accommodate are pronounced with Exceptions include loanwords from Italian such as cappuccino with for
Many placenames and other proper nouns with cester (from Old English ceaster, meaning Roman station or walled town) are pronounced with such as Worcester , Gloucester ( or ), and Leicester The pronunciation occurs as a combination of a historically soft pronunciation and historical elision of the first vowel of the suffix.

The original spellings and pronunciations of Italian loanwords have mostly been kept. Many English words that have been borrowed from Italian follow a distinct set of pronunciation rules corresponding to those in Italian. The Italian soft pronunciation is (as in cello and ciao), while the hard is the same as in English. Italian orthography uses to indicate a hard pronunciation before or , analogous to English using (as in kill and keep) and (as in mosquito and queue). In addition to hard and soft , the digraph represents or, if between vowels, when followed by or (as in scena or sciarpa with , crescendo and fascia with ). Meanwhile, in Italian always represents , not , but English speakers commonly pronounce it as , perhaps in part due to familiarity with the German pronunciation; thus bruschetta often is realized not with the of Italian , but with Italian uses to indicate the geminate before , , or before or English does not have geminate phonemes, thus loanwords with soft that are pronounced with in Italian, such as cappuccino, are normally pronounced in English with the geminate simplified: .

Rarely, the use of unusual suffixed forms to create neologisms occurs. For example, the words ace and race are both standard words but adding ate or age (both productive affixes in English) would create spellings that seem to indicate hard pronunciations. ( and racage). Potential remedies include altering the spelling to and rasage, though no standard conventions exist.

Sometimes replaces , , or , as a trope for giving words a hard edged or whimsical feel. Examples include the Mortal Kombat franchise and product names such as Kool Aid and Nesquik. More intensely, this use of has also been used to give extremist or racist connotations. Examples include Amerika or Amerikkka (where the is reminiscent of German and the totalitarian Nazi regime and the racist Ku Klux Klan, respectively).