The Cedilla and the Digraphs

Portuguese spelling does not exhaust its sounds in the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. To represent phonemes that no single letter covers, it relies on two devices inherited from the Middle Ages: a mark added to a letter — the cedilla — and the pairing of two letters into a single value — the digraph. Both are central pieces of the written system.

The cedilla

The cedilla is the small hook-shaped mark placed under the letter c to form the c-cedilla (ç). Its name tells the whole story: cedilha comes from Spanish cedilla, the diminutive of ceda — the old name of the letter z. In the Visigothic hands of the Peninsula, medieval scribes took to drawing a small cursive z beneath the c; the ç is therefore, literally, a “c with a little z.” It then stood for the affricate /ts/, which later simplified to the /s/ it spells today.

The ç has a single value — [s] — and a strictly regulated use: it appears only before a, o and u. Before e and i, the same /s/ sound is written with a plain c (cedo, cinza), so a cedilla there would be redundant and is forbidden.

Hence the regular alternations within word families, where ç and c take turns according to the following vowel:

The cedilla never occurs at the start or the end of a word: no Portuguese word begins or ends in ç (the rare exceptions, such as the Brazilian place name Iguaçu, are proper names of Tupi origin).

The digraphs

A digraph is a group of two letters that represents a single phoneme. It is crucial not to confuse it with a letter: digraphs are not part of the alphabet and have no name of their own or separate dictionary entry. Portuguese distinguishes consonantal digraphs, worth one consonant, from vocalic digraphs, in which a vowel followed by m or n notes a nasal vowel (campo, tempo, fim) — a matter treated under the tilde and nasality.

Digraph	Sound	Example	Meaning
ch	[ʃ]	*chave*	key
lh	[ʎ]	*malha*	mesh
nh	[ɲ]	*vinho*	wine
rr	[ʁ]	*carro*	car
ss	[s]	*massa*	dough
gu	[ɡ]	*guerra*	war
qu	[k]	*quente*	hot

The digraphs rr and ss exist because, between vowels, a single r or s has a different value: caro [ˈkaɾu] contrasts with carro [ˈkaʁu] , and casa [ˈkazɐ] (with /z/) contrasts with massa [ˈmasɐ] (with /s/). Doubling the consonant is the way to keep the “strong” sound in intervocalic position. In the digraphs gu and qu, by contrast, the u is merely a graphic signal guaranteeing the hard [ɡ] or [k] before e and i (guerra, quilo), and is not pronounced — unlike água or quadro, where the u does sound.

There are also clusters such as sc, sç and xc which, in certain words, stand for /s/ (nascer, cresça, exceto); these are sometimes counted among the digraphs.

An Occitan inheritance

Two of the most characteristic Portuguese digraphs — lh and nh — are not a native invention. They were borrowed from Occitan (Provençal) spelling in the 12th and 13th centuries, in the wake of troubadour prestige, to note the palatal consonants [ʎ] and [ɲ] , which Latin had no way of writing. Castilian solved the same problem differently, with ll and ñ.

Digraphs and syllable division

In hyphenation at the end of a line, the digraphs behave in two opposite ways, and it is best not to mix them up:

• ch, lh and nh are never split, because each one is worth a single consonant: bi-cho, ve-lho, ma-nhã.
• rr, ss, sc, sç and xc are always split, one letter to each syllable: car-ro, pas-so, nas-cer, cres-ça, ex-ce-to.

Cedilla and digraphs solve, at heart, the same problem: giving the writing hand the sounds that the Latin alphabet, devised for another language, left without a letter. They are the graphic memory of a thousand years of adaptation.