A breve is the diacritic mark˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. As used in Ancient Greek, it is also called brachy, βραχύ. It resembles the caron but is rounded, in contrast to the angular tip of the caron. Compare caron:
Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ
versus breve:
Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ
Length
The breve sign indicates a short vowel, as opposed to the macron ¯, which indicates long vowels, in academic transcription. It is often used that way in dictionaries and textbooks of Latin, Ancient Greek, Tuareg and other languages. However, there is a frequent convention of indicating only the long vowels. It is then understood that a vowel with no macron is short. If the vowel length is unknown, a breve as well as a macron are used in historical linguistics. In Cyrillic script, a breve is used for Й. In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў and in the Latin Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet uses a breve on Ӂ to represent a voiced postalveolar affricate . In Chuvash, a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ and Ӗ. In Itelmen orthography, it is used for Ӑ, О̆ and Ў. The traditional Cyrillic breve differs in shape and is thicker on the edges of the curve and thinner in the middle, compared to the Latin one. In Latin types, the shape looks like ears. In Emilian, ĕ ŏ are used to represent in dialects where also long occur. In Esperanto, u with breve represents a non-syllabicu in diphthongs, analogous to Belarusian ў. In the transcription of Sinhala, the breve over an m or an n indicates a prenasalized consonant; for example, n̆da is used to represent. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, a breve over a phonetic symbol is used to indicate extra-shortness.
Other uses
In other languages, it is used for other purposes.
In Romanian, A with breve represents /ə/, as in măr.
G-breve appears in the Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Tatar, and Turkish alphabets. In Turkish, ğ lengthens the preceding vowel. It is thus placed between two vowels and is silent in standard Turkish but may be pronounced in some regional dialects or varieties closer to Ottoman Turkish.
On German language maps, a double breve is often used in abbreviated placenames that end in -b͝g., short for -burg, a common suffix originally meaning “castle”. This prevents misinterpretation as -berg, another common suffix in placenames. Thus, for example, Freib͝g. stands for Freiburg, not Freiberg.
