Typographers tend to use the term caron, while linguists prefer the Czech word háček.
In most Slavic and other European languages it indicates present or historical palatalization (e → ě; [e] → [ʲe]), iotation, or postalveolar articulation (c → č; [ts] → [tʃ]).
The name appears in most English dictionaries, but they treat the long mark (acute accent) differently.
British dictionaries, such as the OED, ODE, CED, write háček (with the mark) in the headwords,[7] while American ones, such as the Merriam-Webster, NOAD, AHD, incorrectly omit the acute and write haček,[8] however, the NOAD gives háček as an alternative spelling.
[citation needed] The caron evolved from the dot above diacritic, which Jan Hus introduced into Czech orthography (along with the acute accent) in his De Orthographia Bohemica (1412).
Other Romance languages, by contrast, tend to use their own orthographies, or in a few cases such as Spanish, borrow English sh or zh.
Philologists and the standard Finnish orthography often prefer using it to express sounds for which English require a digraph (sh, ch, and zh) because most Slavic languages use only one character to spell the sounds (the key exceptions are Polish sz and cz).
[citation needed] The caron ⟨ǎ⟩ represents a rising tone in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Using an apostrophe in place of a caron can be perceived as very unprofessional, but it is still often found on imported goods meant for sale in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (compare t’ to ť, L’ahko to Ľahko).
(Apostrophes appearing as palatalization marks in some Finnic languages, such as Võro and Karelian, are not forms of caron either.)
[citation needed] The following are the Czech and Slovak letters and digraphs with the caron (Czech: háček, Slovak: mäkčeň): In Lower Sorbian and Upper Sorbian, the following letters and digraphs have the caron: Balto-Slavic Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian and Lithuanian use č, š and ž.
(Incidentally, in transcriptions, Finnish orthography has to employ complicated notations like mettšä or even the mettshä to express Karelian meččä.)
The caron is also used in Mandarin Chinese pinyin romanization and orthographies of several other tonal languages to indicate the "falling-rising" tone (similar to the pitch made when asking "Huh?").
The caron can be placed over the vowels: ǎ, ě, ǐ, ǒ, ǔ, ǚ.
The caron is used in the New Transliteration System of D'ni in the symbol š to represent the sound [ʃ] (English "sh").
A-caron (ǎ) is also used to transliterate the Cyrillic letter Ъ (er golyam) in Bulgarian—it represents the mid back unrounded vowel [ɤ̞].
Caron marks a falling and rising tone (bǔ, bǐ) in Fon languages.
Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with caron" as precomposed characters and these are displayed below.
The characters Č, č, Ě, ě, Š, š, Ž, ž are a part of the Unicode Latin Extended-A set because they occur in Czech and other official languages in Europe, while the rest are in Latin Extended-B, which often causes an inconsistent appearance.