From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A breve (Latin brevis "short, brief") is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like a little round cup, designed to indicate a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯ which indicates long vowels. It is often used this way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek and some other languages, such as Tuareg. (However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only – but all – the long vowels: it is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short.) It looks similar to caron or háček, but the caron has a sharp tip, whilst the breve is rounded. Compare Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ (breve).

In the Cyrillic alphabet, a breve is used for Й (short I). In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (U short) and Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. In the Chuvash a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (Ye-breve).

In other languages, it is used for other purposes. In Romanian it is used above the A to represent the schwa (ə) vowel, as in măr (apple). In Esperanto it can be used above the U to form a non-syllabic U, similar to English W in sound. G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, Ğ/ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish, but may be pronounced as /g/ in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.

Breve, together with circumflex and horn, are used in the Vietnamese language to represent additional vowels.

Interlingua has no diacritical marks, so the breve appears only in an occasional loanword. Note that pinyin uses the caron, not the breve, to indicate the third tone of Mandarin Chinese. The McCune-Reischauer Romanization of the Korean Hangul script uses breves, not carons, over o and u to indicate the vowels ㅓ (ŏ) and ㅡ (ŭ).^[1]

Unicode and HTML numeric entities for breve letters

• Caron
• Macron

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents