the #Esperanto alphabet!

What are the “hatted letters” in the Esperanto alphabet?

Running through the alphabet, this clip hits Esperanto’s six diacritic letters: ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. Esperanto speakers call the accent mark itself a ĉapelo (“hat”), so these are informally the ĉapelitaj literoj — the “hatted letters.” Each one exists so that every sound gets exactly one letter, with no digraphs like English “sh” or “ch” needed.

Because the accent marks aren’t on every keyboard, two workaround systems exist: the official h-system (writing ch, gh, hh, jh, sh, u instead) and the informal x-system (cx, gx, hx, jx, sx, ux), both from the era before Unicode made typing ĉ and friends easy. Either way, the rule underneath never changes: one letter, one sound, always.