Saying that Romanian is a bit like French may be a bit of an understatement. They both share a common ancestor for their languages, being Vulgar Latin, and thus have rather similar words, and for some parts, grammar. But these similarities go a bit further than that. In orthography, both French and Romanian have their own seemingly extensive use of diacritics. French has things like the circumflex and the cedilla, while Romanian has diacritics like the comma below and the breve.

Deriving from the Latin word brevis, meaning “brief” or “short”, the breve is often used to mark short vowels in academic transcription of classical manuscripts. This comes in contrast with the macron, which is used to mark long vowels instead. You might see the macron used in writing Polynesian languages like Hawaiian and Samoan, where it is used to mark long vowels. Languages like Latin, Ancient Greek, and Tuareg are marked using this system, particularly the meter system in Latin poetry. One example is the introduction to Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid.

– u u| – u u| -|| -| – -| – u u |- –
Ărmă vĭ-rŭmquĕ că-nō, Trō-iae quī prīmŭs ăb ōrīs
– u u|- -| – || u u| – -| – u u| – –
Ītălĭ-ǎm fā-tō prŏfŭ-gŭs Lā-vīniăquĕ vēnĭt
– u u | – – | – – | – || – | – u u |- –
lītŏră, mŭlt(um) ĭl-l(e) ĕt tĕr-rīs iăc-tātŭs ĕt ăltō
– u u| – || – | – u u| – -| – u u |- –
vī sŭpĕ-rŭm, sae-vae mĕmŏ-rĕm Iū-nōnĭs ŏb īrăm;

However, in other conventions, only the long vowels are marked (with the macron), leaving the reader to assume that vowels not marked with a macron are short. In cases where vowel length is uncertain, both the macron and breve are used to mark the vowel by historical linguists.

The breve is a diacritic that is rather notably used in Romanian, which makes the /ə/ sound from the letter ă. But that is not all; the g-breve, ğ, is used in various languages like Azerbaijani, Kazakh (which is undergoing its transition to using the Latin alphabet), Crimean Tatar, Tatar, and most notably, Turkish. You might have heard about the pronunciation of Turkey’s current president’s last name Erdoğan. In Turkish, the letter ğ essentially lengthens the preceding vowel, and generally unpronounced in Standard Turkish, but can also have this [ɰ] sound in some variants.

This diacritics is also used in languages like Vietnamese, which, when used with the letter “a”, as “ă“, produces a central mid-open to open vowel. No true English equivalent vowel exists, making it hard for English speakers learning Vietnamese to distinguish this sound from the similar “a”, that is, after discounting the tonal system Vietnamese uses that English lacks.

But the Latin alphabet is not the only writing system which uses the breve. The Cyrillic alphabet has a letter containing the breve, called the “short i” or “yot” Й й. Representing the palatal approximant /j/, it is typically pronounced like the “y” in “yes”. In Russian, it almost always appears as the second part of a diphthong, although it can occur in other positions in loan words and some last names. Other counterparts exist too, such as the “short u” Ў used in languages like Belarussian.

Beyond these, the breve is commonly used in transcribing some languages into the Latin alphabet. For some languages, the breve is used to transcribe for short vowels, or reduced vowels, while in others, vowels with breves on them could be used to denote a different vowel quality. You might have seen the transcription of North Korea’s Korean using the letters ŏ and ŭ, which are used to transcribe the vowel soundsㅓ and ㅡ respectively.

Interestingly, in some maps using the German language, the breve is also used. But it is not just any other breve; it is a double breve, that is, a breve stretched to cover two letters instead of one. The double breve in question here is -b͝g.. Unlike the previous uses of the breve, this one serves as an abbreviation of the suffix -burg, which means “castle”. This supposedly prevented confusion with another common suffix in German place names, -berg. So Freiburg (im Breisgau in Baden-Württemberg, or an der Elbe in Niedersachsen) would be abbreviated as Freib͝g..

However, there is another diacritic that you should not get confused with — the caron, or the wedge. This deserves its own post covering its usage, and hopefully, uncover some bits about its history.