Accent Mark Definition, What are Accent Marks

A diacritical mark or diacritic, sometimes called an accent mark, is a mark added to a letter to alter a word's pronunciation (i.e., vowel marks) or to distinguish between similar words. The word derives from the Greek word διακριτικός (diakritikos, distinguishing). Note that diacritic is a noun and diacritical is the corresponding adjective.

A accent mark can appear above or below the letter to which it is added, or in some other position; however, note that not all such marks are diacritical. For example, in English, the tittle (dot) on the letters i and j is not a accent mark, but rather part of the letter itself. Further, a mark may be diacritical in one language, but not in another; for example, in Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish, u and ü are considered the same letter, while in German, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish and Azeri they are considered to be separate letters.

The main usage of a diacritic is to change the phonetic meaning of the letter, but the term is also used in a more general sense of changing the meaning of the letter or even the whole word. Examples are writing numerals in numeral systems, such as early Greek numerals and marking abbreviations with the titlo in old Slavic texts.

Types of Diacritic

• ( ˙ ) anunaasika superdot
• ( . ) anusvaara subdot, used in Sanskrit and in Old Irish spelling
• ( ¸ ) cedilla or "cédille" in French, Latvian, Portuguese and other languages.
• ( ˛ ) ogonek or "Polish hook"
• ( ° ) kroužek or ring; unlike in Czech, in the Scandinavian languages this is not considered a diacritic but an integral part of the character å, a separate letter in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
• ( ˘ ) breve (literally "short"); part of the character when used in Esperanto; also used in Romanian and Ko
• ( ˇ ) caron or háček ("little hook" in Czech). In Slovak it is called mäkčeň ("softener" or "palatalization mark"), in Slovenian strešica ("little roof"), in Croatian and Serbian kvačica ("little hook").
• ( ^ ) circumflex, part of the character when used in Esperanto, also in Slovak is used on "o" and it is called vokáň
• ( ¯ ) macron, also known as a "long mark" in English and Latvian; used to mark long vowels in Māori, Hawaiian, Japanese Rōmaji, Sanskrit transliteration and elsewhere.
• ( ¨ ) diaeresis (also dieresis) or umlaut, a diacritic in some languages, but part of the character in the German, Swedish, Finnish, Ukrainian and Russian languages. Also used in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Swiss German, Dutch, Greek and Turkish.
• ( ` ) grave accent
• ( ´ ) acute accent
• ( ˝ ) double acute accent
• (  ̔ ) spiritus asper or rough breathing mark
• (  ̓ ) spiritus lenis or smooth (or soft) breathing mark
• hook (dấu hỏi), as used in Vietnamese

Marks that are sometimes diacritics, but also have other uses, are:

• ( | ) bar through the basic letter
• ( , ) comma
• ( ~ ) tilde
• (  ҃ ) titlo, used to indicate abbreviation in the early Cyrillic alphabet
• ( ' ) apostrophe
• ( : ) colon, used to attach native affixes (such as case markers) to foreign words and abbreviations
• ( - ) hyphen - in English, hyphens can be used to break words between syllables, to resolve ambiguities in pronunciation:
• repair (fix) compared to re-pair (pair again).
• Kuringgai becomes Ku-ring-gai.

Diacritic Usage

Catalan has grave, acute, cedilla and diaeresis.

Several Chinese romanizations use umlaut, but only on u (ü). In Hanyu Pinyin, the five tones of Mandarin Chinese are denoted by the macron (First tone), acute (second tone), caron (third tone) and grave (Fourth tone) diacritics. example:ā,á,ǎ,à.

Czech has acute, caron and ring.

Dutch uses diaeresis. For example in ruïne it means that the u and i are separately pronounced in their usual way, and not in the way that the combination ui is normally pronounced. Thus it works as a separation sign and not as an indication for an alternative version of the i. Diacritics can be used for emphasis (érg koud for very cold) or for disambiguation between a number of words that are spelled the same when context doesn't indicate the correct meaning (één appel = one apple, een appel = an apple; vóórkomen = to occur, voorkómen = to prevent). Grave and acute accents are used on a very small number of words, mostly loanwords.

English is one of the few European languages that does not use diacritical marks (along with Basque), except for some borrowings taken unchanged mainly from French, in which case the diacritic is often omitted. The most likely words to keep the diacritic are apparently those containing é (such as café) and the word naïve (See List of English words with diacritics). English used to use the diaeresis much like Dutch does still (as in words such as "coöperate"), but this has been falling out of use (The New Yorker's house style being one of the few publications to retain this feature). The grave accent was also once used cheifly in poetry and songs to modify the pronunciation of words ending in -ed; -èd indicates a separate syllable.

In Estonian, the umlaut is used much as in Finnish, but also with ü instead of Finnish y. Another vowel õ also occurs in Estonian. Carons in š or ž may appear only in foreign proper names and loanwords, but may be also substituted with sh or zh in some texts. Apostrophe can be used in declension of some foreign names to separate the stem from any declension endings; e.g., Monet' or Monet'sse for the genitive case and illative case, respectively, for (the famous painter) "Monet".

French uses grave, acute, circumflex, cedilla and diaeresis. However, not all diacritics occur on all vowels in French:

• Acute (accent aigu) only occurs on e (é, pronounced /e/)
• Grave (accent grave) occurs on e (è, pronounced /ε/), a (à), and u (ù)
• Circumflex (accent circonflexe) occurs on all vowels: e (ê, pronounced /ε/), a (â, pronounced /α/), i (î), o (ô, pronounced /o/), and u (û; if occurring in the combination eû, pronounced /ø/)
• Cedilla (cédille) is used only under the c (ç, pronounced /s/). It is used in cases in which a c is soft before a, o, or u, such as ça (pronounced /sa/, not /ka/).
• Diaeresis (tréma) occurs on e (ë), i (ï), u (ü), and y (ÿ). The diaeresis only occurs on y in a few proper nouns, including Louÿs and L'Haÿ-les-Roses. The mark's function is to indicate that the vowel is pronounced separately from the one just before it.
• Diacritics are sometimes omitted from capitalized letters, especially in France. The origin of this omission lies in mechanical typesetting in which the addition of a diacritic to a capital letter would change its height and thus require separate versions of a capital letter with and without its diacritc: this was deemed impractical and the diacritics were thus dropped from capital letters. However, with the advent of digital typography the use of diacritics on capital letters has become more prevalent, especially on documents created in a word processor (as opposed to professional work designed for widespread consumption).
• Not all French diacritics affect pronunciation. However, all cases in which they do have been noted in the foregoing.

Finnish uses a colon to decline loanwords and abbreviations; e.g., USA:han for the illative case of "USA". Also characters ä and ö are part of the Finnish alphabet (a and o with Umlaut).

German and Swiss German have the Umlaut (¨). This can be used over a, o, or u to indicate vowel modification. For instance: Ofen (/'o:fən/); Öfen (/'ø:fən/), which in this case makes the difference between singular and plural (“oven”/“ovens”). The sign originated in a superscript e; a handwritten Sütterlin e resembles two parallel vertical lines, like an umlaut.

Hawaiian has kahakos (macrons) and okinas (ʻ); often rendered as (‘).

Hebrew has many various diacritic marks known as Niqqud that are used above and below script to represent vowels. These Niqqud must be distinguished from Cantillation, which are keys to pronunciation and syntax.

The International Phonetic Alphabet uses diacritic symbols and diacritic letters to indicate phonetic features or secondary articulations.

Irish uses acute accent to indicate that the vowel is long. It is known as síneadh fada (long sign) or simply fada (long) in Irish.

Italian mainly has the acute and the grave (à, è/é, ì, ò/ó, ù).

• They indicate the stressed vowel of a word, chiefly on the final vowel of words of more than one syllable (thus verità, "truth", Gesù, "Jesus", finì, "[he/she/it] ended"). These two accents are furthermore used to avoid mispronunciations in monosyllables containing rising diphthongs (as in più, "more", which would otherwise be stressed on the i; also e.g. in ciò, "that, it", where the -i- is mute, [tʃɔ], but that would be read *[tʃio] without the accent), and to distinguish words that would otherwise be homographs (such as te, "you", and tè, "tea", or se, "if", and sé, "himself/herself/themselves"). The standard rule in contemporary Italian is the following: on a, i and u only the grave is used (thus à, ì, ù, as in the three examples given before); on the vowels e and o, that both represent two different vowel-sounds, the acute indicates the close pronunciation (é = /e/, ó = /o/), the grave the open one (è = /ε/, ò = /ɔ/): examples are perché, "because, why", and cioè, "namely, that is"; parlò, "[he/she] spoke", and cómpito, "task" (in the last case the accent is optional, but may be used to distinguish the word from compìto, "accomplished, polite").

• Italian may also use the circumflex (^) on the vowel i: this -î is optionally (but rarely) used to indicate the contraction of an original double i at the end of some words (properly of latinisms only), usually in plural form (e.g. assassini may mean both "murderers", plural of assassino, and "murders", plural of assassinio, so assassinii or assassinî is sometimes used in the sense of "murders"; in several cases the distinction is better expressed using stress marks: thus prìncipi means "princes", princìpi means "principles, beginnings"; conservatóri means "conservatives", conservatòri "academies of music, conservatoires"). In older texts a final -j (principj, etc.) was sometimes used. But the usual form is -i (one i only), and the cases of possible ambiguities are actually very rare.

Romanized Japanese (Romaji) uses diacritics to mark long vowels. The Hepburn romanization system uses a macron to mark long vowels, and the Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki systems use a circumflex.

Lithuanian uses the acute, grave and tilde in dictionaries to indicate stress types in the language's pitch stress system. In general usage, where letters appear with the caron (č, š and ž) they are considered as separate letters from c, s or z and collated separately; letters with the ogonek (ą, ę, į and ų), the macron (ū) and the superdot (ė) are considered as separate letters as well, but not given a unique collation order.

Portuguese uses the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla, to denote vowel stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. Brazilian Portuguese also uses the diaeresis mark. Accented letters are not considered separate characters.

Many Slavic and Baltic languages use caron to signify either palatalisation or iotation.

Many Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet have ogonek and bar.

Slovak has acute, caron, circumflex (only above o) and diaresis (only above a).

Spanish uses acute, diaeresis and tilde. Acute is used on a vowel in a stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break" a diphthong as in tío (pronounced /'tio/, and not /tjo/ as it would be without the accent). Moreover, the acute can be used to distinguish words that otherwise are spelt alike, such as si ( = "if") and sí ( = "yes"), and also to distinguish interrogative and relative words otherwise spelt alike, such as donde/¿dónde? ( = "where") or como/¿cómo? ( = "as"/"how?"). Tilde is used on n, forming a separate letter (ñ) in the Spanish alphabet. Diaeresis is used only over u (ü) so that it is pronounced /w/ in the combinations gue and gui (where u is normally silent), for example ambigüedad. In poetry, diaeresis may be used on i and u as a way to force hiatus.

Swedish sometimes uses the acute accent, exclusively over the letter e to show non-standard stress, like in kafé or resumé. Usage isn't mandatory, though.

Tagalog uses a hyphen after a consonant to indicate a syllable break (nag-alis /nag·a·lís/ as opposed to nagalis /na·ga·lís/). A hyphen is not necessary between two vowels, vowels being distinctly pronounced in Tagalog (tauhan /ta·ú·han/, buo /bu·ô/).

Tamil does not have any diacritics in itself, but uses the Western numerals 2, 3 and 4 as diacritics to represent aspirated, voiced, and voiced-aspirated consonants when the Tamil script is used to write to long passages in Sanskrit.

Thai has its own system of diacritics derived from Indic numerals.

Vietnamese uses acute (dấu sắc), grave (dấu huyền), tilde (dấu ngã), dot below (dấu nặng) and hook (dấu hỏi) on vowels as tone indicators.

Welsh uses the circumflex, diaeresis, acute and grave accents on its seven vowels a, e, i, o, u, w, y. The most common is the circumflex (which it calls to bach, meaning "little roof") to denote a long vowel, usually to disambiguate it from a similar word with a short vowel. The rarer grave accent has the opposite effect, shortening vowel sounds which would usually be pronounced long. The acute accent and diaeresis are also occasionally used, to denote stress and vowel separation respectively. The w-circumflex and y-circumflex are among the most common accented characters in Welsh, but unusual in languages generally, and were until recently very hard to obtain in word-processed and HTML documents.

Non-Diacritic Usage

Esperanto has a separate letter which is a u with a breve over it, and letters which are c, g, h, j and s with the circumflex over them. These are not diacritic marks, but necessary parts of entirely separate letters.

Estonian has a distinct letter õ which contains a non-diacritical tilde. Estonian "dotted vowels" ä, ö, ü are similar to German, but these are also distinct letters, not containing umlauts. All four of these letters have their own place in the alphabet (between w and x).

Faroese and Icelandic use acute accents, digraphs, and other special letters. All are considered separate letters, and have their own place in the alphabet:

• Faroese: á, ð, í, ó, ú, ý, æ and ø
• Icelandic: á, ð, é, í, ó, ú, ý, æ, ö and þ

Finnish uses dotted vowels (ä and ö) similar to in Swedish, and å, š and ž in foreign names and loanwords; they are considered distinct letters and collate after z.

Hungarian uses the acute and double acute accent (unique to Hungarian): áéíóú and őű. The diacritic marks over the letters ö and ü are not umlauts. The acute accent indicates the long form of a vowel, while the double acute performs the same function for ö and ü. Both long and short forms of the vowels are listed separately in the Hungarian alphabet.

Maltese uses a C, G, and Z with a dot over them (Ċ, Ġ, Ż), and also has a H with an extra horizontal bar. For upper case H, the extra bar is written slightly above the usual bar. For lower case H, the extra bar is written crossing the vertical, like a t, and not touching the lower part (Ħ, ħ). The above letters are considered separate letters, not dicritics. Maltese sometimes uses diacritics on some vowels to indicate stress or long vowels, however this usage is restricted to pronunciation assistance in dictionaries. The letter 'c' without a dot has fallen out of use due to redundancy. 'ċ' is pronounced like the English 'ch' and 'k' is used as a hard c as in 'cat'. The Maltese Z is pronounced like a 'ts' (Zokkor (sugar) is pronounced 'tsoh-kor') while 'ż' is closer to the English 'z' as in 'żarbun (shoe), pronounced 'zahr-boon'. 'G' is a hard 'g' sound, pronounced like the 'g' in the English word 'sugar' while 'ġ' is a soft 'g' as in 'ġobon' (cheese), pronounced 'job-ohn'.

Romanian uses a breve on the letter a (ă) to indicate the sound schwa (/ə/), as well as a circumflex over the letters a (â) and i (î) for the sound /ɨ/. Romanian also writes a comma below the letters s (ș) and t (ț) to represent the sounds /ʃ/ and /ʦ/, respectively.

Among the Scandinavian languages, Danish and Norwegian have long used ash (æ, actually a ligature) and o-slash (ø), but have more recently incorporated a-ring (å) after Swedish example. Historically the å has developed from a ligature by writing a small a on top of the letter a; if an å character is unavailable, some Scandinavian languages allow the substitution of a doubled a. The Scandinavian languages collate these letters after z, but have different collation standards. In Swedish, the order å, ä, ö is used, while Danish and Norwegian follow the order æ, ø, å instead.

Swedish uses characters identical to a-diaeresis (ä) and o-diaeresis (ö) in the place of ash and o-slash in addition to the a-circle (å). Historically the diaresis for the Swedish letters ä and ö, like the German umlaut, has developed from a small gothic e written on top of the letters.

Turkish uses a G with a breve (Ğ), two letters with a diaeresis (Ö and Ü, representing two rounded front vowels), two letters with a cedilla (Ç and Ş, representing the affricates /tʃ/ and /ʃ/), and also possesses a dotted capital İ (and a dotless lowercase ı representing a high unrounded back vowel). In Turkish each of these are separate letters, rather than versions of other letters, where dotted capital İ and lower case i are the same letter, as are dotless capital I and lowercase ı. Typographically, Ç and Ş are often rendered with a subdot, as in Ṣ; when a hook is used, it tends to have more a comma shape than the usual cedilla. See also Turkish alphabet.

Vietnamese uses the horn for the letters ơ and ư; circumflex for the letters â, ê, and ô; breve for the letter ă; and a bar through the letter đ. See Vietnamese alphabet for their collation order.

In all these cases they are not seen as additional marks over the vowel, but are actually a necessary part of these characters, as they represent entirely different sounds to the basic forms.

Cyrillic alphabets

Belarusian has a letter ў.

Russian has the letter ё, usually replaced in print by е, although it has a different pronunciation. Ё is still used in children's books and in handwriting. A minimal pair is все (vse, "all" pl.) and всё (vsio, "everything" n. sg.).

Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian have the letter й.

Ukrainian also has the letter ï.

Acute accents are also used in Slavic language dictionaries and textbooks to indicate lexical stress, placed over the vowel of the stressed syllable. This can also serve to disambiguate meaning (e.g., in Russian писа́ть (pisát) means "to write", but пи́сать (písat) means "to piss").

Non-Alphabetic Scripts

Some non-alphabetic scripts also employ symbols that function essentially as diacritics.


Non-pure abjads (such as Hebrew and Arabic script) and abugidas use diacritics for denoting vowels. Hebrew and Arabic also indicate consonant doubling and change with diacritics; Hebrew and Devanagari use them for foreign sounds. Devanagari and related abugidas also use a diacritical mark called a virama to mark the absence of a vowel.

The Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries use the dakuten (゛) and handakuten (゜) symbols, also known as ten-ten and maru, to indicate voiced consonants.


Alphabetization or Collation

Modern computer technology was developed mostly in the English speaking countries, so data formats, keyboard layouts, etc. were developed with an English bias; a "simple" alphabet without diacritical marks. This has led to fears internationally that the marks and accents may become obsolete to facilitate the worldwide exchange of data. Efforts have been made to create domain names that extend further than the English alphabet: the internationalized domain names, example: "pokémon.com".

Depending on the keyboard layout, which differs amongst countries, it is more or less easy to enter letters with diacritics on computers and typewriters. Some have their own keys, some are created by first pressing the key with the diacritic mark followed by the letter to place it on. Such a key is sometimes referred to as a dead key, as it produces no output of its own, but modifies the output of the key pressed after it.

In modern Microsoft Windows operating systems, the keyboard layout US International allows one to type almost all diacritics directly: "+e gives ë, ~+o gives õ, etc. On Apple Macintosh computers, there are keyboard shortcuts for the most common diacritics; Option-e followed by a vowel places an acute accent, Option-u folowed by a vowel gives an umlat, option-c gives a cedelle, etc. Diacritics can be composed in most X Window System keyboard layouts.

On computers it is also a matter of available code pages, whether you can use certain diacritics. Unicode solves this problem by assigning every known character its own code; if this code is known most modern computer systems provide a method to input it. With Unicode it is also possible to combine diacritical marks with most characters.