Š

Template:Short description Template:Distinguish Template:Infobox grapheme

Š in upper- and lowercase, sans-serif and serif

The grapheme Š, š (S with caron) is used in various contexts representing the sh sound like in the word show, usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar fricative Template:IPAslink or similar voiceless retroflex fricative Template:IPAslink. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this sound is denoted with ʃ or ʂ, but the lowercase š is used in the Americanist phonetic notation, as well as in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. It represents the same sound as the Turkic letter Ş and the Romanian letter Ș (S-comma), the Hebrew and Yiddish letter ש, the Ge'ez (Ethiopic) letter ሠ, the Cyrillic letter Ш, the Arabic letter ش and the Armenian letter Շ (շ).

For use in computer systems, Š and š are at Unicode codepoints U+0160 and U+0161 (Alt 0138 and Alt 0154 for input), respectively. In HTML code, the entities &Scaron; and &scaron; can also be used to represent the characters.

Primary usageEdit

The symbol originates with the 15th-century Czech alphabet that was introduced by the reforms of Jan Hus.<ref name="Tošović">Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Sfn From there, it was first adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830 to represent the same sound,Template:Sfn and from there on into other orthographies, such as Latvian,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Lithuanian,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Slovak,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Slovene, Karelian, Sami, Veps and Sorbian.

Some orthographies such as Bulgarian Cyrillic, Macedonian Cyrillic, and Serbian Cyrillic use the "ш" letter, which represents the sound that "š" would represent in Latin alphabets.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Moreover, Bosnian,<ref name="Tošović" /> Serbian,<ref name=Rhem>Template:Cite book</ref> Croatian, and Montenegrin standard languages adopted Gaj's Croatian alphabet alongside Cyrillic thereby adopting "š",<ref name=Greenberg>Template:Cite book</ref> while the same alphabet is used for Romanization of Macedonian. Certain variants of Belarusian Latin<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and Bulgarian Latin also use the letter.

In Finnish and Estonian, š occurs only in loanwords.<ref>Finnish orthography and the characters š and ž</ref>

Polish and Hungarian do not use š. Polish uses the digraph sz. Hungarian uses the basic Latin letter s and uses the digraph sz as equivalent to most other languages that use s.

Outside Europe, Syriac Latin<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> adopted the letter but it, alongside other letters with diacritics, is rarely used. The alphabet is not used natively to write the language for which the Syriac alphabet is used instead.

The letter is also used in Lakota,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Cheyenne, Myaamia<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree),<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> Classical Malay (until end of 19th century) and some African languages such as Northern Sotho and Songhay. It is used in the Persian Latin (Rumi) alphabet, equivalent to ش.

TransliterationEdit

The symbol is also used as the romanization of Cyrillic ш in ISO 9 and scientific transliteration and deployed in the Latinic writing systems of Macedonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Bashkir. It is also used in some systems of transliterating Georgian to represent Template:Angle brackets (Template:IPAslink).

In addition, the grapheme transliterates cuneiform orthography of Sumerian and Akkadian Template:IPAslink or Template:IPAslink, and (based on Akkadian orthography) the Hittite Template:IPAslink phoneme, as well as the Template:IPAslink phoneme of Semitic languages, transliterating shin (Phoenician File:Phoenician sin.svg and its descendants), the direct predecessor of Cyrillic ш.