This diacritic we will cover today will bother a lot of font developers who want to make a sans-serif font, basically a typeface that lacks any sort of protruding bits at the end of a stroke. These projecting features are called “serifs”, and here, the one bothersome bit is called the cedilla, a diacritic mark written as a hook or a tail that modifies the pronunciation of certain letters it is attached to.
Among the letters the cedilla could be attached to, letters like ç and ş are perhaps the most common, although the former is the most frequently-occurring letter, being referred to as either along the lines of c-cédille or broken-c.
You may have been this letter in languages like French, Portuguese and Turkish, but its origins were not quite what you think. The cedilla, as its name suggests, has a rather Spanish origin. It is derived as a diminutive of the Spanish word for zeta, ceda, which was originally written as a cursive z. This cedilla is thus the bottom tail part of this cursive letter.
The c-cedilla was originally used to represent the /ts/ sound in Old Spanish, but has since found its way into other European languages like French and Catalan, where it represents a soft-c sound, pronounced as /s/. In orthographical rules, this c-cedilla is written where a c would typically represent a hard-c sound /k/, often before the vowels /a/, /o/, and /u/, including their diacritical variants, or in some languages, at the end of the word. Hence, you would pronounce the word français as [fʁɑ̃sɛ].
Why then, do people not write the c as an s then? Well, from our coverage of the circumflexed letters in languages like French, rewriting c’s as s’s would potentially introduce ambiguities. For example, sa and ça in French mean totally different things, the former referring to a possessive pronoun, while the latter could be translated as “that”. Other reasons could include word histories, where a c in Latin was originally always pronounced hard, with a /k/ sound.
The c-cedilla is also used to represent a /tʃ/ sound in languages like Albanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Kurdish, although rather boringly called çe in Turkish. Similarly, in many Turkic languages, the letter ş is used to represent the /ʃ/ sound, although not many exciting details could be found about this letter.
There are, however, several false friends you might not be aware about. The tails attached to the bottom of letters like a and e in Polish and Lithuanian are not cedillas, despite their jarring appearance in sans serif typefaces. These instead, carry the diacritic called the ogonek, which is not really related to the cedilla we are covering right here.
Romanian also adds diacritical commas to the bottom of some letters, and those letters should not be mistaken for cedillas either. These letters include the s-comma, ș, which represents the same sound as ş in Turkish. Perhaps these diacritical commas are one solution to make letters like these compatible with sans serif typefaces.
For now, this is where we will leave our little orthographical tale from our alphabets. I hope you have learnt a thing or two about a certain mark in our writing systems, and we will be back next Saturday for another language titbit.
The Language Closet 
You title this post «the story of the cedilla» but you provide no source at all. You say it comes from Spanish but give no date. This document from 1011 is the first Catalan document that shows a c cedilla.
inoçenter in modern Catalan is innocent
This other one is from10,
çabatarii in modern Catalan is sabater, shoemaker.
Can you provide a previous one in other languages?
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I must admit that I wanted to focus more on the etymological history of the cedilla and examples of its current usage rather than the graphological history when writing this, and I should have titled this post better. But its etymology gives some possible hints of its graphological origins as well.
The letter ‘z’ in some written forms had a tail, and that tail still persists in some cursive standards today. Some examples of the potential predecessors of the c-cedilla could be found in the Visigothic scripts, generally used to write Latin in the 8th to 13th centuries.
Visigothic script, with the cursive form (top) and miniscule form (bottom). From Littera Visigothica, 2013.
On the furthest right of these images, the letter ‘z’ resembled a possible predecessor of the c-cedilla, marked by a descender common with a cursive ‘z’. However, the Visigothic scripts were a result of evolution and development from Roman cursive scripts in centuries prior, and continued to evolve over the centuries. A possible development is the reduction of the ‘z’ descender into a tail attached to a ‘c’, much like what this source claimed, and what your images demonstrated.
While some codices had examples of the letter ‘z’ resembling a ‘cz’, I am not sure if it a ‘cz’ ligature happened at some point, as this source claimed that this combination provided a compelling case for a direct predecessor to the c-cedilla. Littera Visigothica was unable to verify the claim that the Visigothic ‘z’ led to the cedilla.
The Chronicle of 754 seemed to have an example of a ‘z’ in the Visigothic miniscule, although the letter ‘z’ resembled more closely to the cursive ‘z’ we use today. The Littera Visigothica has helpful resources to look for codices and manuscripts written in the Visigothic scripts from various time periods as well.
The c-cedilla did persist in Spanish in most of its subsequent history, as seen in this orthography (Reglas de Ortografía Española) of 1512 by Antonio de Nebrija. This changed in 1741, in the Orthographía española de 1741, when an orthographical reform suggested the replacement of the c-cedilla with the letter ‘z’. I hope this helps.
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