Afrikaans uses two little hats over its vowels, and they do completely different jobs. The two dots — the diaeresis, as in reën — tell you to start a new syllable; that is covered on the diaeresis page. This page is about the other hat: the circumflex, called the kappie ("little cap") in Afrikaans, which appears as ê, ô, î, û. The kappie is not decoration and it is not optional. It marks a vowel that is both long and open — a quality genuinely different from the plain short vowel and from a plain doubled vowel. Skip the kappie and you have, at best, misspelled the word and, at worst, written a different word entirely.
What the kappie actually signals
Take the bare letter e. In bed it is a short [ɛ]; in see it is a long, close [eː] like the ee in English see. Now put a kappie on it: ê is a long open vowel, [ɛː] — the vowel of British English square held out. It is not the close ee of see. So Afrikaans distinguishes three things with the same base letter:
| Spelling | Vowel | IPA | Like English | Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| e | short, open | [ɛ] | bed | bed |
| ee | long, close | [eː] | roughly say | see (sea) |
| ê | long, open | [ɛː] | square (held) | sê (say) |
That middle-versus-bottom contrast is the whole point. see and sê are different words with different vowels, and only the kappie tells them apart in writing.
Wat wil jy vir my sê?
What do you want to say to me?
Ek kan die see van hier af sien.
I can see the sea from here.
ê — the long open front vowel
ê is by far the most common kappie vowel. It is [ɛː], a held-out, open front vowel. Two everyday words to anchor it:
Die hele wêreld weet daarvan.
The whole world knows about it.
Sit die melk in die yskas en bêre die brood.
Put the milk in the fridge and store the bread away.
In wêreld and bêre the ê sits before a liquid (r), and many speakers open it even further, to something close to [æː] (the a of English cat, lengthened). Either way it is long and open — never the close ee of see. Compare the minimal contrast directly:
Sê dit nog 'n keer, ek het nie gehoor nie.
Say it once more, I didn't hear.
Here sê [sɛː] must not be read as se [sə], the unstressed possessive marker (Jan se hond, "Jan's dog"). The kappie is the only thing separating the verb sê ("say") from the grammatical word se ("'s"). That is a phonemic, meaning-bearing difference, not a stylistic one.
ô — the long open back vowel
ô is the back-vowel counterpart, [ɔː] — a long, open "aw", like the vowel in British story drawn out. The headline word is môre, which means both "morning" and "tomorrow":
Ek sien jou môre by die werk.
I'll see you tomorrow at work.
Goeiemôre! Het jy goed geslaap?
Good morning! Did you sleep well?
Without the kappie, more is simply not the standard spelling of this word. As with ê, the contrast with the plain doubled vowel is real: oo in boom is the close [oː], whereas ô is the open [ɔː]. Keep the jaw lower for ô.
î and û — the rare ones
The last two kappie vowels turn up in only a handful of words, but those words are common, so they are worth knowing.
û is [œː], a long, rounded central vowel — round your lips as if for oo but keep the tongue where it is for the u in English book, and hold it. The classic example is the plural of brug (bridge):
Die stad het baie ou brûe oor die rivier.
The city has many old bridges over the river.
î is the rarest, [əː] — a long version of the neutral schwa vowel — surviving in just a few words such as wîe (wedges) and wîend in older spelling. You will meet it far less often than the other three.
Sny die kaas in klein wîe.
Cut the cheese into small wedges.
The hidden pattern: the kappie often marks a dropped g
Here is the insight most pronunciation guides miss. The circumflex very frequently appears in plurals and derived forms where an old intervocalic g has dropped out. When Afrikaans loses a g between vowels, the two vowels collapse into a single long vowel — and a kappie is written to show it.
The cleanest example is exactly the one above. The singular is brug with a hard g; in the plural the g between the vowels disappears, the vowels merge, and you get brûe with the kappie marking the new long vowel:
Dit is een brug; daar is twee brûe.
That's one bridge; there are two bridges.
The same g-deletion drives forms like lag → laggende but laag → laë (low → low ones), where the diaeresis or kappie steps in to mark the vowels left stranded by the lost g. This is why the kappie feels unpredictable to beginners: it is not random, it is a fossil of a consonant that used to be there. Once you see it as "a g used to live here", the spelling stops feeling arbitrary. See g and ng and g-deletion spelling for the full mechanics.
Common mistakes
❌ Wat wil jy vir my se?
Incorrect — without the kappie this is 'se' (the possessive 's), not the verb 'say'.
✅ Wat wil jy vir my sê?
What do you want to say to me?
❌ Ek sien jou more by die werk.
Incorrect — 'môre' (tomorrow/morning) needs its kappie; 'more' is not the standard spelling.
✅ Ek sien jou môre by die werk.
I'll see you tomorrow at work.
❌ Die hele wereld weet daarvan.
Incorrect — 'wêreld' has an open kappie vowel, not a plain e.
✅ Die hele wêreld weet daarvan.
The whole world knows about it.
❌ Daar is twee brüe oor die rivier.
Incorrect — this uses the diaeresis (two dots), but the plural of brug takes the circumflex: brûe.
✅ Daar is twee brûe oor die rivier.
There are two bridges over the river.
❌ Pronouncing 'sê' like the 'ee' in 'see'.
Incorrect — ê is long and open [ɛː], not the close [eː] of 'see'.
✅ 'sê' = a long, open 'eh' [sɛː], jaw kept low.
Pronounce ê like 'square' held out.
Key takeaways
- The kappie (circumflex) marks a vowel that is long and open — distinct from both the short vowel and the close doubled vowel (ee, oo).
- ê = [ɛː] (sê, wêreld, bêre), ô = [ɔː] (môre), û = [œː] (brûe), î = [əː] (wîe, rare).
- It is phonemic: sê (say) versus se ('s); môre versus a misspelling — the kappie carries meaning.
- The kappie often marks a dropped intervocalic g: brug → brûe. See g-deletion spelling and g and ng.
- Don't confuse it with the diaeresis (two dots), which splits syllables instead — see the diaeresis.
Now practice Afrikaans
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Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Long and Short VowelsA1 — How Afrikaans separates long from short vowels in both sound and spelling, why a single vowel can mean a different word from a doubled one, and why training your ear fixes your spelling at the same time.
- The Diaeresis: ë, ï, ö, üA2 — How the Afrikaans diaeresis (deelteken) works — a hiatus marker that splits two vowels into separate syllables, so reën is re-ën not 'reen', and why it is nothing like the German umlaut.
- G, GH and NG: Spelling the GutturalsA2 — How Afrikaans spells the g-sounds — plain g for the fricative, gh for the rare hard-g loan sound, ng for the velar nasal — and why g vanishes between vowels.
- Spelling with the CircumflexA2 — When to write the circumflex (kappie) on ê ô î û — it marks a long, distinct vowel, separates minimal pairs like sê and se, and often marks the spot where a g has dropped out (brug → brûe).
- Spelling Words with Deleted GB1 — Why hoog becomes hoë and brug becomes brûe — how dropping an intervocalic g forces a diaeresis or circumflex, unifying a whole family of plural, comparative and adjective spellings.