Š

Not to be confused with the Sámi youth magazine Š or the Esperanto letter Ŝ.

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 /ʃ/ or similar voiceless retroflex fricative /ʂ/. 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).

Eš
Š š
Usage
Writing system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic
Language of origin	Czech language
Sound values	[ʃ] [ʂ]
In Unicode	U+0160, U+0161
History
Development	Σ σ ς ς 𐌔 S s Ṡ ṡ Š š
Transliterations	Ш Ⱎ ש ش շ
Other
Writing direction	Left-to-Right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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

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 Š and š can also be used to represent the characters.

Primary usage

The symbol originates with the 15th-century Czech alphabet that was introduced by the reforms of Jan Hus.^[1][2] From there, it was first adopted into the Croatian alphabet by Ljudevit Gaj in 1830 to represent the same sound,^[3] and from there on into other orthographies, such as Latvian,^[4] Lithuanian,^[5] Slovak,^[6] 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.^[7] Moreover, Bosnian,^[1] Serbian,^[8] Croatian, and Montenegrin standard languages adopted Gaj's Croatian alphabet alongside Cyrillic thereby adopting "š",^[9] while the same alphabet is used for Romanization of Macedonian. Certain variants of Belarusian Latin^[10] and Bulgarian Latin also use the letter.

In Finnish and Estonian, š occurs only in loanwords.^[11]

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^[12] 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,^[13] Cheyenne, Myaamia^[14] and Cree (in dialects such as Moose Cree),^[15] 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.

Transliteration

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 ⟨შ⟩ (/ʃ/).

In addition, the grapheme transliterates cuneiform orthography of Sumerian and Akkadian /ʃ/ or /t͡ʃ/, and (based on Akkadian orthography) the Hittite /s/ phoneme, as well as the /ʃ/ phoneme of Semitic languages, transliterating shin (Phoenician and its descendants), the direct predecessor of Cyrillic ш.

Computing code

Character information

Preview	Š		š
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER S WITH CARON		LATIN SMALL LETTER S WITH CARON
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	352	U+0160	353	U+0161
UTF-8	197 160	C5 A0	197 161	C5 A1
Numeric character reference	Š	Š	š	š
Named character reference	Š		š

See also

• Ш, ш – Sha (Cyrillic)
• Sz (digraph)
• Ś
• ʃ – Esh (letter)
• Caron
• Shin (letter)
• Voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant
• Ș
• Ş

References

1. Tošović, Branko (2010). Korrelative Grammatik des Bosni(aki)schen, Kroatischen und Serbischen: Dio 1. Phonetik, Phonologie, Prosodie (in German). LIT Verlag Münster. p. 100. ISBN 978-3-6435-0100-4.
2. Kempgen et al. 2014, p. 1518.
3. Kempgen et al. 2014, p. 1523.
4. Rūk̦e-Dravin̦a, Velta (1977). The Standardization Process in Latvian: 16th Century to the Present. Almqvist & Wiksell international. p. 56. ISBN 978-9-1220-0109-6.
5. Baldi, Philip; Dini, Pietro U. (2004). Studies in Baltic and Indo-European Linguistics: In Honor of William R. Schmalstieg. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 199. ISBN 978-1-5881-1584-3.
6. Krajčovič, Rudolf (1975). A historical phonology of the Slovak language. Winter. p. 17. ISBN 978-3-5330-2329-6.
7. Daskalov, Roumen; Vezenkov, Alexander (2015). Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Three:Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies. BRILL. p. 7. ISBN 978-9-0042-9036-5.
8. Rhem, Georg; Uszkoreit, Hans (2012). The Serbian Language in the Digital Age. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 53. ISBN 978-3-6423-0755-3.
9. Greenberg, Robert D. (2004). Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration. Oxford University Press. p. 103. ISBN 978-0-1992-5815-4.
10. Kamusella, Tomasz (2008). The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe. Springer. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-2305-8347-4.
11. Finnish orthography and the characters š and ž
12. "A Cuneiform Correspondence to Alphabetic ש in West Semitic Names of the I Millennium B.C". Orientalia. 7 (1). Gregorian Biblical Press: 91. 1978. ISSN 0030-5367.
13. Andersson, Rani-Henrik (2020). The Lakota Ghost Dance Of 1890. University of Nebraska Press. p. 402. ISBN 978-1-4962-1107-1.
14. Costa, David (1990). The Miami-Illinois Language. University of Nebraska Press.
15. Pentland, David H. (2004). "Papers of the Thirtieth Algonquian Conference". Anthropological Linguistics. 46 (1). ISSN 0003-5483.

Sources

• Kempgen, Sebastian; Kosta, Peter; Berger, Tilman; Gutschmidt, Karl (2014). Die slavischen Sprachen / The Slavic Languages. Halbband 2. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-1102-1547-2.