Grave accent
Encyclopedia
The grave accent (icon or uk) is a diacritical mark used in written Breton
, Catalan
, Corsican
, Dutch
, French
, Greek
(until 1982; see polytonic orthography
), Italian
, Mohawk
, Norwegian
, Occitan, Portuguese
, Scottish Gaelic
, Vietnamese
, Welsh
, Romansh, and other languages.
of Ancient Greek
to mark a lower pitch
than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it is used to replace an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when the word is followed immediately by another word in the sentence.
Originally, however, the grave marked any syllable that was not marked with an acute or circumflex. This practice was soon given up for the less laborious one of marking only the last syllable.
Since Modern Greek
has a stress accent
instead of a pitch accent, both the grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent
in the modern monotonic orthography.
of a word in Catalan
and Italian
. Some examples from Italian are città "city", morì "[he/she] died", virtù "virtue", Mosè "Moses", portò "[he/she] brought, carried". Especially with capital letters, or when using a keyboard without accented letters, an apostrophe
is sometimes used instead of it in Italian, thus E’ instead of È "[he/she/it] is", though this is considered (at least) inelegant and inaccurate (though the phrase un po’ meaning "a little" is infrequently spelt as un pò, because it's a truncated
version of un poco).
In Italian, there are pairs of words, one accented and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning, such as pero "pear tree" and però "but", and papa "pope" and papà "dad" (the last example is also valid for Catalan).
In Bulgarian
and Macedonian
, the grave is used on the vowels а, о, у, е, и, ъ (Bulgarian only), to mark stress. It is particularly used in books for children or foreigners, or to distinguish between near-homophone
s: па̀ра steam, vapour and пара̀ cent/penny, money, въ̀лна wool and вълна̀ wave. In a few cases (mostly on the vowels е and и) the stress mark is orthographically required to distinguish words which are homonyms. For example, the Macedonian negation particle не is a homonym with the short-form of the direct object personal pronoun нe – thus нѐ. The grave in these cases forces the stress on the graved word-syllable, instead of having a different syllable in the stress group get accented. In turn, this changes the pronunciation and the whole meaning of the group.
In Ukrainian
, Rusyn
, Belarusian
and Russian
, the similar system was in use until the first half of the 20th century. Now the main stress is preferably being marked with an acute, and the role of grave is limited to mark secondary stress in compound words (in dictionaries and in linguistic literature).
In the descendants of Serbo-Croatian
and in Slovene, the stressed syllabe can be short or long, as well as having rising or falling tone. To show this, these languages use (in dictionaries, orthography and grammar books etc.) four different stress marks (grave, acute, double grave and circumflex). The system is identical both in Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
In modern Church Slavonic, there are three stress marks (acute, grave and circumflex). There is no phonetical distinction between them, only the orthographical one. Grave is typically used when the stressed vowel is the last letter of a multi-letter word.
: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Roman languages:
, the accent is used to denote a short vowel
sound in a word which would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound, for example mẁg mʊɡ "mug" versus mwg muːɡ "smoke".
In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel the use of acute accents is seen in older texts, but is no longer allowed according to the new orthographical conventions
.
and Mandarin Chinese (when written in Hanyu Pinyin or Zhuyin Fuhao), the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone
. The alternative to the grave accent in Mandarin is the numeral 4 after the syllable: pà = pa4.
In African languages
, the grave accent is often used to indicate a low tone, e.g. Nobiin
jàkkàr "fish-hook", Yoruba
àgbọ̀n "chin", Hausa
màcè "woman".
The grave accent is used to represent the low tone in Kanien'kéha
or Mohawk.
, the grave accent indicates the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words (crasis
). For example, instead of a aquela hora ("at that hour"), one says and writes àquela hora.
In Hawaiian
, the grave accent (alone, not placed over another character) is sometimes encountered as a typographically easier substitute for the [[ʻokina]], e.g. Hawai`i instead of Hawaiʻi.
words, is sometimes used in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a vowel usually silent is to be pronounced, in order to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word ending with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /ˈlʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊk.ɨd/ look-ed). It can also be used in this capacity to distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense
of learn, learned /ˈlɜrnd/, from the adjective
learnèd /ˈlɜrn.ɨd/ (for example, "a very learnèd man").
Italic
s, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, vis-à-vis
, pièce de résistance
and crème brûlée
.
The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters à, è, ì, ò, ù, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the grave accent are available in Unicode
.
In the ASCII
character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character
, encoded as 768, hex 300. Outside the US, character 96 is often replaced by accented letters. In the French ISO 646 standard, the character at this position is µ. Many older UK computers, such as the ZX Spectrum
and BBC Micro
, have the £
symbol as character 96, though the British ISO 646 variant ultimately placed this symbol at position 35 instead.
On many computer keyboards, the grave accent occupies a key by itself, and is meant to be combined with vowels as a multi-key combination or as a dead key
to modify the following letter.
On a Mac, to get a character such as à, the user must type Option-` and then the vowel. For example, to make à, the user must type Option-` and then 'a', and to make À, the user must type Option-` and then Shift-a.
On a system running the X Window System
, to get a character such as à, the user should press compose and ` together, then the vowel. The compose key on modern keyboards is usually mapped to a Windows key or shift+AltGR.
On a US and UK QWERTY keyboard
, the grave accent key is placed in the top left corner. In many PC based computer games, the key is used to open the console window, allowing the user to execute commands via a CLI.
When using TeX
to typeset text, the backtick character is used as a syntax to represent curly opening quotes. For example,
Many of the Unix shell
s and the programming language
s Perl
, PHP
, and Ruby
use pairs of this character to indicate command substitution
, that is, substitution of the standard output from one command into a line of text defining another command. For example, the code line:
echo It is now `date`
might result, after command substitution, in the command:
echo It is now
which then on execution produces the output:
It is now
In the Bash shell, the `...` is deprecated in favour of $(...). The same is true of Z shell
.
In Lisp
macro systems, the backquote character (called quasiquote in Scheme) introduces a quoted expression in which comma-substitution may occur. It is identical to the plain quote, except that symbols prefixed with a comma
will be replaced with those symbols' values as variables. This is roughly analogous to the Unix shell's variable interpolation with
In m4
, it is used together with an apostrophe to quote strings (to suppress or defer macro expansion).
In MySQL
, it is used in queries as a table and database classifier.
In Pico
, the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language.
In Haskell
, a function name surrounded by backquote allows you to use it as an infix operator.
In OCaml, the backquote is used to indicate polymorphic variants.
In Go
, the backquote is used to surround a raw string literal.
Windows PowerShell
uses the backquote as the escape character. For example, a newline character is denoted
is specified in PowerShell as
Prior to Python
3.0, "backticks" were used as a synonym for the
plain text markup language (implemented in the Python docutils package).
In Verilog
, the grave accent is used to define constants (e.g. after the line
In Unlambda
, the backquote character denotes function application.
In BBC BASIC
, the backquote character is valid within (and at the beginning of) a variable, structure, procedure or function name.
Breton language
Breton is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany , France. Breton is a Brythonic language, descended from the Celtic British language brought from Great Britain to Armorica by migrating Britons during the Early Middle Ages. Like the other Brythonic languages, Welsh and Cornish, it is classified as...
, Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
, Corsican
Corsican language
Corsican is a Italo-Dalmatian Romance language spoken and written on the islands of Corsica and northern Sardinia . Corsican is the traditional native language of the Corsican people, and was long the vernacular language alongside the Italian, official language in Corsica until 1859, which was...
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
(until 1982; see polytonic orthography
Greek diacritics
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography notates Ancient Greek phonology...
), Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Mohawk
Mohawk language
Mohawk is an Iroquoian language spoken by around 2,000 people of the Mohawk nation in the United States and Canada . Mohawk has the largest number of speakers of the Northern Iroquoian languages; today it is the only one with greater than a thousand remaining...
, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Occitan, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic language
Scottish Gaelic is a Celtic language native to Scotland. A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish, and thus descends ultimately from Primitive Irish....
, Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
, Romansh, and other languages.
Greek
The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthographyGreek diacritics
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography notates Ancient Greek phonology...
of Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
to mark a lower pitch
Pitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it is used to replace an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when the word is followed immediately by another word in the sentence.
Originally, however, the grave marked any syllable that was not marked with an acute or circumflex. This practice was soon given up for the less laborious one of marking only the last syllable.
Since Modern Greek
Modern Greek
Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic...
has a stress accent
Stress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
instead of a pitch accent, both the grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
in the modern monotonic orthography.
Stress
The grave accent marks the stressed vowelStress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
of a word in Catalan
Catalan language
Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
and Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
. Some examples from Italian are città "city", morì "[he/she] died", virtù "virtue", Mosè "Moses", portò "[he/she] brought, carried". Especially with capital letters, or when using a keyboard without accented letters, an apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...
is sometimes used instead of it in Italian, thus E’ instead of È "[he/she/it] is", though this is considered (at least) inelegant and inaccurate (though the phrase un po’ meaning "a little" is infrequently spelt as un pò, because it's a truncated
Apocope
In phonology, apocope is the loss of one or more sounds from the end of a word, and especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.-Historical sound change:...
version of un poco).
In Italian, there are pairs of words, one accented and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning, such as pero "pear tree" and però "but", and papa "pope" and papà "dad" (the last example is also valid for Catalan).
In Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
and Macedonian
Macedonian language
Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
, the grave is used on the vowels а, о, у, е, и, ъ (Bulgarian only), to mark stress. It is particularly used in books for children or foreigners, or to distinguish between near-homophone
Homophone
A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose and rose , or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the same are also both homographs and homonyms...
s: па̀ра steam, vapour and пара̀ cent/penny, money, въ̀лна wool and вълна̀ wave. In a few cases (mostly on the vowels е and и) the stress mark is orthographically required to distinguish words which are homonyms. For example, the Macedonian negation particle не is a homonym with the short-form of the direct object personal pronoun нe – thus нѐ. The grave in these cases forces the stress on the graved word-syllable, instead of having a different syllable in the stress group get accented. In turn, this changes the pronunciation and the whole meaning of the group.
In Ukrainian
Ukrainian language
Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
, Rusyn
Rusyn language
Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...
, Belarusian
Belarusian language
The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
and Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, the similar system was in use until the first half of the 20th century. Now the main stress is preferably being marked with an acute, and the role of grave is limited to mark secondary stress in compound words (in dictionaries and in linguistic literature).
In the descendants of Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian language
Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
and in Slovene, the stressed syllabe can be short or long, as well as having rising or falling tone. To show this, these languages use (in dictionaries, orthography and grammar books etc.) four different stress marks (grave, acute, double grave and circumflex). The system is identical both in Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
In modern Church Slavonic, there are three stress marks (acute, grave and circumflex). There is no phonetical distinction between them, only the orthographical one. Grave is typically used when the stressed vowel is the last letter of a multi-letter word.
Height
The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced openOpen-mid vowel
An open-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel...
: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Roman languages:
- CatalanCatalan languageCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and o). - FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and u), but only with e does it serve to indicate a pronunciation change. For example, the accent mark in lève [lεv], indicates that it is not pronounced as a schwaSchwaIn linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
, like in lever [ləve]. - ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
- Occitan
Disambiguation
The grave accent is used to distinguish homophones in several languages:- CatalanCatalan languageCatalan is a Romance language, the national and only official language of Andorra and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
, where it distinguishes, for example, ma ("my") from mà ("hand"). - FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. The grave accent on the letters a and u has no effect on pronunciation and only serves to distinguish homonyms that are otherwise spelled the same. It distinguishes the preposition à ("to/belonging to/towards") from the verb a (the third-person singular present tense of avoir), as well as the adverb là ("there") and the feminine definite articleDefinite ArticleDefinite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...
la; it is also used in the word déjà and the phrase çà et là ("hither and thither"; without the accent, it would literally mean "it and the"). It is used on the letter u only to distinguish où ("where") and ou ("or"). È is rarely used to distinguish homonyms, except in dès/des ("since/some"), ès/es ("in/are"), and lès/les ("near/the"). - ItalianItalian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, where it distinguishes for example the conjunction e "and" from the verb è ("he/she/it is"), or the feminine article la from the adverb là ("there"). - In NorwegianNorwegian languageNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
(both BokmålBokmålBokmål is one of two official Norwegian written standard languages, the other being Nynorsk. Bokmål is used by 85–90% of the population in Norway, and is the standard most commonly taught to foreign students of the Norwegian language....
and NynorskNynorskNynorsk or New Norwegian is one of two official written standards for the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. The standard language was created by Ivar Aasen during the mid-19th century, to provide a Norwegian alternative to the Danish language which was commonly written in Norway at the...
), the grave accent is used to separate words which would otherwise be identical, for instance og (and) and òg (too). Popular usage, possibly because Norwegian rarely uses diacritics, often leads to a grave accent being used in place of an acute accentAcute accentThe acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
. - Romansh, where it distinguishes (in the "Rumantsch Grischun" standard) e "and" from the verb form è ("he/she/it is") and en "in" from èn ("they are"). The grave also marks distinctions of stress (gia "already" vs. gìa "violin") and of vowel quality (letg "bed" vs. lètg "marriage").
Length
In WelshWelsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
, the accent is used to denote a short vowel
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
sound in a word which would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound, for example mẁg mʊɡ "mug" versus mwg muːɡ "smoke".
In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel the use of acute accents is seen in older texts, but is no longer allowed according to the new orthographical conventions
Scottish Gaelic orthography
Scottish Gaelic orthography has evolved over many centuries. Scottish Gaelic spelling is mainly based on etymological considerations.Due to the etymological nature of the writing system, the same written form may result in a multitude of pronunciations depending on the spoken variant...
.
Tone
In some tonal languages such as VietnameseVietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
and Mandarin Chinese (when written in Hanyu Pinyin or Zhuyin Fuhao), the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
. The alternative to the grave accent in Mandarin is the numeral 4 after the syllable: pà = pa4.
In African languages
African languages
There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
, the grave accent is often used to indicate a low tone, e.g. Nobiin
Nobiin language
Nobiin is a Northern Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. ‘Nobiin’ is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ‘Nubian" and literally means ‘ of the Nubians"...
jàkkàr "fish-hook", Yoruba
Yoruba language
Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
àgbọ̀n "chin", Hausa
Hausa language
Hausa is the Chadic language with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by about 25 million people, and as a second language by about 18 million more, an approximate total of 43 million people...
màcè "woman".
The grave accent is used to represent the low tone in Kanien'kéha
Mohawk language
Mohawk is an Iroquoian language spoken by around 2,000 people of the Mohawk nation in the United States and Canada . Mohawk has the largest number of speakers of the Northern Iroquoian languages; today it is the only one with greater than a thousand remaining...
or Mohawk.
Other uses
In PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, the grave accent indicates the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words (crasis
Crasis
Crasis is a type of contraction in which two vowels or diphthongs merge into one new vowel or diphthong — making one word out of two. Crasis occurs in Portuguese and Arabic as well as in Ancient Greek, where it was first described.-French:...
). For example, instead of a aquela hora ("at that hour"), one says and writes àquela hora.
In Hawaiian
Hawaiian language
The Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...
, the grave accent (alone, not placed over another character) is sometimes encountered as a typographically easier substitute for the [[ʻokina]], e.g. Hawai`i instead of Hawaiʻi.
English
The grave accent, although not standardly applied to any EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
words, is sometimes used in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a vowel usually silent is to be pronounced, in order to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word ending with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /ˈlʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊk.ɨd/ look-ed). It can also be used in this capacity to distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense
Past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
of learn, learned /ˈlɜrnd/, from the adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
learnèd /ˈlɜrn.ɨd/ (for example, "a very learnèd man").
Italic
Italic type
In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
s, with appropriate accents, are generally applied to foreign terms that are uncommonly used in or have not been assimilated into English: for example, vis-à-vis
Vis-à-vis
Vis-à-vis may refer to:* Vis-à-vis * "Vis à Vis" , an episode of Star Trek: Voyager...
, pièce de résistance
Pièce de résistance
Pièce de résistance is a French term , translated into English literally as "piece of resistance," referring to the best part or feature of something , a showpiece, or highlight. It can be thought of as the portion of a creation which defies Pièce de résistance is a French term (circa 1839),...
and crème brûlée
Crème brûlée
Crème brûlée , also known as burnt cream, crema catalana, or Trinity cream is a dessert consisting of a rich custard base topped with a contrasting layer of hard caramel...
.
Technical notes
| additional diacritic |
character | Unicode | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latin | |||
| — | À à |
U+00C0 U+00E0 |
À à |
| È è |
U+00C8 U+00E8 |
È è |
|
| Ì ì |
U+00CC U+00EC |
Ì ì |
|
| Ò ò |
U+00D2 U+00F2 |
Ò ò |
|
| Ù ù |
U+00D9 U+00F9 |
Ù ù |
|
| Ǹ ǹ |
U+01F8 U+01F9 |
Ǹ ǹ |
|
| Ẁ ẁ |
U+1E80 U+1E81 |
Ẁ ẁ |
|
| Ỳ ỳ |
U+1EF2 U+1EF3 |
Ỳ ỳ |
|
| diaeresis | Ǜ ǜ |
U+01DB U+01DC |
Ǜ ǜ |
| double grave |
Ȁ ȁ |
U+0200 U+0201 |
Ȁ ȁ |
| Ȅ ȅ |
U+0204 U+0205 |
Ȅ ȅ |
|
| Ȉ ȉ |
U+0208 U+0209 |
Ȉ ȉ |
|
| Ȍ ȍ |
U+020C U+020D |
Ȍ ȍ |
|
| Ȑ ȑ |
U+0210 U+0211 |
Ȑ ȑ |
|
| Ȕ ȕ |
U+0214 U+0215 |
Ȕ ȕ |
|
| macron | Ḕ ḕ |
U+1E14 U+1E15 |
Ḕ ḕ |
| Ṑ ṑ |
U+1E50 U+1E51 |
Ṑ ṑ |
|
| circumflex | Ầ ầ |
U+1EA6 U+1EA7 |
Ầ ầ |
| Ề ề |
U+1EC0 U+1EC1 |
Ề ề |
|
| Ồ ồ |
U+1ED2 U+1ED3 |
Ồ ồ |
|
| breve | Ằ ằ |
U+1EB0 U+1EB1 |
Ằ ằ |
| horn | Ờ ờ |
U+1EDC U+1EDD |
Ờ ờ |
| Ừ ừ |
U+1EEA U+1EEB |
Ừ ừ |
|
| Cyrillic | |||
| — | Ѐ ѐ |
U+0400 U+0450 |
Ѐ ѐ |
| Ѝ ѝ |
U+040D U+045D |
Ѝ ѝ |
|
| Ѷ ѷ |
U+0476 U+0477 |
Ѷ ѷ |
|
| Greek (varia) | |||
| — | ` | U+1FEF | ` |
| Ὰ ὰ |
U+1FBA U+1F70 |
Ὰ ὰ |
|
| Ὲ ὲ |
U+1FC8 U+1F72 |
Ὲ ὲ |
|
| Ὴ ὴ |
U+1FCA U+1F74 |
Ὴ ὴ |
|
| Ὶ ὶ |
U+1FDA U+1F76 |
Ὶ ὶ |
|
| Ὸ ὸ |
U+1FF8 U+1F78 |
Ὸ ὸ |
|
| Ὺ ὺ |
U+1FEA U+1F7A |
Ὺ ὺ |
|
| Ὼ ὼ |
U+1FFA U+1F7C |
Ὼ ὼ |
|
| smooth breathing |
῍ | U+1FCD | ῍ |
| Ἂ ἂ |
U+1F0A U+1F02 |
Ἂ ἂ |
|
| Ἒ ἒ |
U+1F1A U+1F12 |
Ἒ ἒ |
|
| Ἢ ἢ |
U+1F2A U+1F22 |
Ἢ ἢ |
|
| Ἲ ἲ |
U+1F3A U+1F32 |
Ἲ ἲ |
|
| Ὂ ὂ |
U+1F4A U+1F42 |
Ὂ ὂ |
|
| — ὒ |
— U+1F52 |
— ὒ |
|
| Ὢ ὢ |
U+1F6A U+1F62 |
Ὢ ὢ |
|
| rough breathing |
῝ | U+1FDD | ῝ |
| Ἃ ἃ |
U+1F0B U+1F03 |
Ἃ ἃ |
|
| Ἓ ἓ |
U+1F1B U+1F13 |
Ἓ ἓ |
|
| Ἣ ἣ |
U+1F2B U+1F23 |
Ἣ ἣ |
|
| Ἳ ἳ |
U+1F3B U+1F33 |
Ἳ ἳ |
|
| Ὃ ὃ |
U+1F4B U+1F43 |
Ὃ ὃ |
|
| Ὓ ὓ |
U+1F5B U+1F53 |
Ὓ ὓ |
|
| Ὣ ὣ |
U+1F6B U+1F63 |
Ὣ ὣ |
|
| iota subscript |
— ᾲ |
— U+1FB2 |
— ᾲ |
| — ῂ |
— U+1FC2 |
— ῂ |
|
| — ῲ |
— U+1FF2 |
— ῲ |
|
| smooth breathing, iota subscript |
ᾊ ᾂ |
U+1F8A U+1F82 |
ᾊ ᾂ |
| ᾚ ᾒ |
U+1F9A U+1F92 |
ᾚ ᾒ |
|
| ᾪ ᾢ |
U+1FAA U+1FA2 |
ᾪ ᾢ |
|
| rough breathing, iota subscript |
ᾋ ᾃ |
U+1F8B U+1F83 |
ᾋ ᾃ |
| ᾛ ᾓ |
U+1F9B U+1F93 |
ᾛ ᾓ |
|
| ᾫ ᾣ |
U+1FAB U+1FA3 |
ᾫ ᾣ |
|
| diaeresis | ῭ | U+1FED | ῭ |
| — ῒ |
— U+1FD2 |
— ῒ |
|
| — ῢ |
— U+1FE2 |
— ῢ |
|
The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters à, è, ì, ò, ù, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the grave accent are available in Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
.
In the ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character
Combining character
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks ....
, encoded as 768, hex 300. Outside the US, character 96 is often replaced by accented letters. In the French ISO 646 standard, the character at this position is µ. Many older UK computers, such as the ZX Spectrum
ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum is an 8-bit personal home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research Ltd...
and BBC Micro
BBC Micro
The BBC Microcomputer System, or BBC Micro, was a series of microcomputers and associated peripherals designed and built by Acorn Computers for the BBC Computer Literacy Project, operated by the British Broadcasting Corporation...
, have the £
Pound sterling
The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
symbol as character 96, though the British ISO 646 variant ultimately placed this symbol at position 35 instead.
On many computer keyboards, the grave accent occupies a key by itself, and is meant to be combined with vowels as a multi-key combination or as a dead key
Dead key
A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after...
to modify the following letter.
On a Mac, to get a character such as à, the user must type Option-` and then the vowel. For example, to make à, the user must type Option-` and then 'a', and to make À, the user must type Option-` and then Shift-a.
On a system running the X Window System
X Window System
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
, to get a character such as à, the user should press compose and ` together, then the vowel. The compose key on modern keyboards is usually mapped to a Windows key or shift+AltGR.
On a US and UK QWERTY keyboard
British and American keyboards
There are two major English language computer keyboard layouts, the United States layout and the United Kingdom layout defined in BS 4822...
, the grave accent key is placed in the top left corner. In many PC based computer games, the key is used to open the console window, allowing the user to execute commands via a CLI.
Use in programming
Programmers have used the grave accent symbol by itself (i.e. not combined with some letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick.When using TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....
to typeset text, the backtick character is used as a syntax to represent curly opening quotes. For example,
` is rendered as single opening curly quote (‘) and `` is a double curly opening quote (“).Many of the Unix shell
Unix shell
A Unix shell is a command-line interpreter or shell that provides a traditional user interface for the Unix operating system and for Unix-like systems...
s and the programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
s Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
, and Ruby
Ruby (programming language)
Ruby is a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features. Ruby originated in Japan during the mid-1990s and was first developed and designed by Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto...
use pairs of this character to indicate command substitution
Command substitution
In computing, command substitution is a facility originally introduced in the Unix shells that allows a command to be run and its output to be pasted back on the command line as arguments to another command...
, that is, substitution of the standard output from one command into a line of text defining another command. For example, the code line:
echo It is now `date`
might result, after command substitution, in the command:
echo It is now
which then on execution produces the output:
It is now
In the Bash shell, the `...` is deprecated in favour of $(...). The same is true of Z shell
Z shell
The Z shell is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a powerful command interpreter for shell scripting...
.
In Lisp
Lisp programming language
Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...
macro systems, the backquote character (called quasiquote in Scheme) introduces a quoted expression in which comma-substitution may occur. It is identical to the plain quote, except that symbols prefixed with a comma
Comma (punctuation)
The comma is a punctuation mark. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight but inclined from the vertical, or...
will be replaced with those symbols' values as variables. This is roughly analogous to the Unix shell's variable interpolation with
$ inside double quotes.In m4
M4 (computer language)
m4 is a general purpose macro processor designed by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. m4 is an extension of an earlier macro processor m3, written by Ritchie for the AP-3 minicomputer.-Use:...
, it is used together with an apostrophe to quote strings (to suppress or defer macro expansion).
In MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...
, it is used in queries as a table and database classifier.
In Pico
Pico programming language
Pico is a programming language developed at the Software Languages Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The language was created to introduce the essentials of programming to non-computer science students....
, the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language.
In Haskell
Haskell (programming language)
Haskell is a standardized, general-purpose purely functional programming language, with non-strict semantics and strong static typing. It is named after logician Haskell Curry. In Haskell, "a function is a first-class citizen" of the programming language. As a functional programming language, the...
, a function name surrounded by backquote allows you to use it as an infix operator.
In OCaml, the backquote is used to indicate polymorphic variants.
In Go
Go (programming language)
Go is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc.The initial design of Go was started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was officially announced in November 2009. In May 2010, Rob Pike publicly stated that Go was being...
, the backquote is used to surround a raw string literal.
Windows PowerShell
Windows PowerShell
Windows PowerShell is Microsoft's task automation framework, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on top of, and integrated with the .NET Framework...
uses the backquote as the escape character. For example, a newline character is denoted
`n. Most commonly used programming languages use a backslash as the escape character (e.g. \n) but because Windows allows the backslash as a path separator, it would have been impractical for PowerShell to use backslash for a different purpose. To get the ` character itself, use two backticks. For example the nullable boolean of .NET.NET Framework
The .NET Framework is a software framework that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It includes a large library and supports several programming languages which allows language interoperability...
is specified in PowerShell as
[Nullable``1[System.Boolean]].Prior to Python
Python (programming language)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
3.0, "backticks" were used as a synonym for the
repr function, which converts its argument to a string suitable for a programmer to view. However, this feature was removed in Python 3.0. Backticks are also used extensively in the reStructuredTextReStructuredText
reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language intended to be highly readable in source format. Its formal name indicates that it is a "revised, reworked, and reinterpreted StructuredText."...
plain text markup language (implemented in the Python docutils package).
In Verilog
Verilog
In the semiconductor and electronic design industry, Verilog is a hardware description language used to model electronic systems. Verilog HDL, not to be confused with VHDL , is most commonly used in the design, verification, and implementation of digital logic chips at the register-transfer level...
, the grave accent is used to define constants (e.g. after the line
`define NUM 100, `NUM can be used as a synonym for 100) whereas the apostrophe is used in specifying sized constants (for example, 5'd10 is a 5-bit constant with the value 10). Accidental use of an apostrophe instead of a grave accent and vice versa is a source of frequent beginner mistakes in the language.In Unlambda
Unlambda
Unlambda is a minimal, "nearly pure" functional programming language invented by David Madore. It is based on combinatory logic, a version of the lambda calculus that omits the lambda operator. It relies mainly on two built-in functions and an "apply" operator...
, the backquote character denotes function application.
In BBC BASIC
BBC BASIC
BBC BASIC is a programming language, developed in 1981 as a native programming language for the MOS Technology 6502 based Acorn BBC Micro home/personal computer, mainly by Sophie Wilson. It is a version of the BASIC programming language adapted for a U.K...
, the backquote character is valid within (and at the beginning of) a variable, structure, procedure or function name.
External links
- Diacritics Project – All you need to design a font with correct accents
- ASCII and Unicode quotation marks – "Please do not use the ASCII grave accent as a left quotation mark"
- Keyboard Help – Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer