Why does Romanian use a comma, not a cedilla, on iPhone?
Type ș or ț on an iPhone and paste the same word somewhere else, and the little mark under the s or t can suddenly look different — a hook curling sideways instead of a small comma sitting underneath. Two separate Unicode letters have been standing in for the same sounds for decades, and this is why they still do not always match.
Type ș or ț in a Romanian sentence on an iPhone and it looks exactly right on your own screen. Paste that same sentence into an old document, an email from a few years back, or a website that has not been touched since the 2000s, and every so often the same two letters look subtly different — the mark under the s or the t is a small hook curling off to one side instead of a comma sitting cleanly underneath. Nothing was typed wrong on either end. Two different characters have been used for the same Romanian sounds for a long time, and Unicode still keeps both of them alive today.
The short answer
Romanian has two letters that are meant to carry a comma below — ș (s) and ț (t) — standardised that way by the Romanian Academy. For years, though, most software actually showed them with a cedilla instead: the same little hook used under the Turkish ş. The comma-below version and the cedilla version are two separate Unicode characters that happen to look nearly identical in most fonts, and both still show up in real Romanian text, which is why the same word can look consistent on one screen and slightly off on another.
One sound, two Unicode letters
- Ș / ș — s with comma below — the correct Romanian letter.
- Ş / ş — s with cedilla — borrowed from Turkish, used for years as a stand-in.
- Ț / ț — t with comma below — the correct Romanian letter.
- Ţ / ţ — t with cedilla — the same borrowed shape, used the same way.
At most font sizes, the comma and the cedilla are close enough to pass for the same mark at a glance — a Romanian reader will read either one correctly without a second thought. To a computer comparing text character by character, they are not the same letter at all. Ș and Ş sit at different code points, and so do Ț and Ţ, so anything that checks whether two pieces of text are identical treats a comma-below word and a cedilla word as two different words, even when a person looking at both would swear they matched.
Why the cedilla version exists at all
Unicode assigned the correct comma-below ș and ț in 1999. The Central European code pages and fonts already in wide use at the time did not include those shapes, but they already had the cedilla forms, borrowed for Turkish. Rather than wait for proper glyphs to reach every font and every operating system, Romanian software, documents and websites kept using the cedilla stand-in for years after the correct letters existed on paper. Comma-below support eventually caught up across major platforms, but a lot of Romanian text written during that stretch, and a fair number of fonts and templates still floating around today, never got converted.
Why it is more than a font quirk
This stops being cosmetic the moment text needs to match itself. Searching a document for a word typed with the correct comma-below ș will not find the same word if it was saved somewhere using the cedilla ş, even though both would read identically out loud and look identical at normal reading size. A spell-checker trained on one version can flag the other as wrong. Sorting a list of Romanian names can put visually identical-looking words in a different order depending on which of the two characters each one actually contains. None of this shows up as an obvious error — it shows up as search, sort or spell-check quietly not doing what it looks like it should.
What iPhone actually gives you
The Romanian keyboard on iPhone produces the correct comma-below ș and ț, matching the modern standard rather than the older workaround. If a word you paste in from somewhere else looks slightly different from what your own keyboard would have typed — the little mark leaning the wrong way, or looking thinner or thicker than the rest of your text — that mismatch almost always travelled in with the pasted text itself, from a source still using the cedilla version, rather than being something your keyboard or your phone got wrong.
Where Kibo fits
Romanian is one of the 30 typing languages built into Kibo, producing the standard comma-below ș and ț like the rest of a modern Romanian layout. Switching to it is a tap or a hold on the globe key, the same as any other language in Kibo’s list, with no separate keyboard to add beyond the one you already turned on in Settings. Typing in Romanian, like any language, needs no Full Access — that switch in Kibo is read only by the Copy word, Copy line and Paste buttons on the toolbar. Kibo is free to download.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between ș and ş in Romanian?
Ș carries a comma below and is the letter standardised by the Romanian Academy. Ş carries a cedilla and was borrowed from Turkish as a stand-in for years when comma-below shapes were missing from common fonts and code pages. They look almost identical but are different Unicode characters.
Why do some Romanian websites or documents use ş and ţ instead of ș and ț?
Because they were written, or use a font, from the period before comma-below support reached every platform. The cedilla forms were already available and close enough visually, so they got used as a substitute, and a lot of that older text was never converted.
Does it matter which version of ș I use when typing Romanian on iPhone?
The iPhone Romanian keyboard already types the correct comma-below version by default, so there is nothing to choose. It matters mainly when comparing or searching text from another source — a comma-below word and a cedilla word will not register as the same word to a computer, even though they read the same to a person.
Try it on your own keyboard
Kibo is a free custom keyboard for iPhone with real mechanical key sounds, a wardrobe of themes and RGB backlight effects. No account, no ads, and it works with Full Access left off.