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Do accents (like ^, ', ~, or even the Ç) affect the order of words, when sorting them?
As a native speaker I never considered those diacritical marks relevant when ordering words, but I would like to know if there is an official source confirming this expectation (or perhaps denying it).
If you're talking about alphabetical ordering in dictionaries or printed indices at the end of books, then the order is this one:
a < á < à < â < ã
c < ç
So we have:
ca (because/for/than) < cá < cà (ca + a before AO 1990) < cã (white hair)
laca < laça
However, this only comes into play as a tie-breaking rule for when two words differ only in their diacritics (in collation lingo, it's a secondary difference):
pelo < pêlo (before A0 1990) < peloiro (= pelouro)
In Portuguese, it's common to ignore accents for sorting. Several official systems (I'd say most of them) even remove them altogether when storing, so they don't affect searching or sorting.
I.e. "a", "à", "á" and "ã" are all treated as "a" for sorting purposes.
But be aware, that this doesn't apply to every language.
