English terms with diacritical marks

Some English language terms have letters with diacritical marks.^[1] Most of the words are loanwords from French, with others coming from Spanish, German, or other languages.^[2] Some are however originally English, or at least their diacritics are.

Proper nouns are not generally counted as English terms except when accepted into the language as an eponym – such as Geiger–Müller tube, or the English terms roentgen after Wilhelm Röntgen, and biro after László Bíró, in which case any diacritical mark is often lost.

Types of diacritical marks

Though limited, the following diacritical marks in English may be encountered, particularly for marking in poetry:^[3]

• the acute accent (née) and grave accent (English poetry marking, changèd), modifying vowels or marking stresses
• the circumflex (entrepôt), indicating omitted "s"
• the diaeresis (Zoë), indicating a second syllable in two consecutive vowels
• the tittle, the dot found on the regular small i and small j, are removed when another diacritic is required
• the macron (English poetry marking, lēad pronounced 'leed', not 'led'), lengthening vowels; or indicating omitted n or m (in pre-Modern English, both in print and in handwriting). The macron is also sometimes encountered to indicate a lengthened vowel in loanwords from Māori
• the breve (English poetry marking, drŏll pronounced 'drol', not 'drowle'), shortening vowels.
• the umlaut (über), altering Germanic vowels
• the cedilla (soupçon), in French and in Portuguese softening c, indicating 's-' not 'k-' pronunciation
• the tilde (Señor), in Spanish indicating palatalised n (although in Spanish and most source languages, it is not considered a diacritic over the letter n but rather as an integral part of the distinct letter ñ)

In representing European personal names, anthroponyms, and place names, toponyms, the following are often encountered:

• the caron (as in Karel Čapek), often also called the haček in English (adapted from "háček", the Czech name [meaning "little hook"]), as Č/č, Š/š, Ř/ř (only in Czech), Ž/ž broadly turns "c" "s" "r" "z" into English "ch" "sh" "rzh" "zh" sounds respectively, and Ď/ď, Ľ/ľ (only in Slovak), Ň/ň and Ť/ť turn "d" "l" "n" and "t" into palatal "dy" "ly" "ny" and "ty" sounds. In most fonts the caron looks like an apostrophe sitting inside the Slovak capital L, as "Ľ", but in fact is only another form of caron.
• the Polish crossed Ł and nasal ogonek (as in Lech Wałęsa) a "dark L", nearer an English "W", and a nasal "e", nearer English "en" (in Polish called "crossed Ł" and [ɔˈɡɔnɛk], "little tail")
• the Croatian and Serbian crossed Đ (as in Franjo Tuđman or Zoran Đinđić), halfway between D and Dj
• the Maltese crossed Ħ (as in the Ħal- town prefix, Ħal Far Industrial Estate), a hard H
• the Swedish over-ring Å (as in the Åland Islands), the å vowel sound
• the Romanian Ș (as in Chișinău), the voiceless postalveolar fricative

For a more complete list see diacritical marks.

Special characters

Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final -ß, often -ss even in German and always in Swiss-German).^[4][5][6]

The reverse of "special characters" is when foreign digraphs, such as Welsh ll in Llanelli, Dutch ij, or Croatian nj (same in Serbian and Bosnian) are simply treated as two standard A–Z characters.

Native English words

In some cases, the diacritic is not borrowed from any foreign language but is purely of English origin. The second of two vowels in a hiatus can be marked with a diaeresis (or "tréma") – as in words such as coöperative, daïs and reëlect – but its use has become less common, sometimes being replaced by the use of a hyphen.^[7] It is also sometimes (rarely) used over a single vowel to show that it is pronounced separately (as in Brontë). It is often omitted in printed works because the sign is missing on modern keyboards.^[8]

The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous (rébel vs. rebél) or nonstandard for metrical reasons (caléndar), the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament).

Words imported from other languages

Non-English loanwords enter the English language by a process of naturalisation, or specifically anglicisation, which is carried out mostly unconsciously (a similar process occurs in all other languages). During this process there is a tendency for accents and other diacritics that were present in the donor language to be dropped (for example French hôtel and French rôle becoming "hotel" and "role" respectively in English, or French à propos, which lost both the accent and space to become English "apropos").^[9]

In many cases, imported words can be found in print in both their accented and unaccented versions. Since modern dictionaries are mostly descriptive and no longer prescribe outdated forms, they increasingly list unaccented forms, though some dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary, do not list the unaccented variants of particular words (e.g., soupçon).

Words that retain their accents often do so to help indicate pronunciation (e.g. frappé, naïve, soufflé), or to help distinguish them from an unaccented English word (e.g. exposé, résumé, rosé). Technical terms or those associated with specific fields (especially cooking or musical terms) are less likely to lose their accents (such as the French soupçon, façade and entrée).

Some Spanish words with the Spanish letter ñ have been naturalised by substituting English ny (e.g. Spanish cañón is now usually English canyon, Spanish piñón is now usually English pinyon pine). Certain words like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin, the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue.^[10] This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for Führer. However, today umlauts are usually either left out, with no e following the previous letter, or in sources with a higher Manual of Style (such as the New York Times or The Economist) included as German. Zurich is an exception since it is not a case of a "dropped umlaut", but is a genuine English exonym, used also in French (from Latin Turicum) written without the umlaut even alongside other German and Swiss names which retain the umlaut in English.^[11]

Accent-addition and accent-removal

As words are naturalized into English, sometimes diacritics are added to imported words that originally didn't have any, often to distinguish them from common English words or to otherwise assist in proper pronunciation. In the cases of maté from Spanish mate, animé from Japanese anime, and latté or even lattè from Italian latte, an accent on the final e indicates that the word is pronounced with an ay sound at the end, rather than the e being mute. In a similar vein but in reverse, the Internet shows examples of a partial removal include resumé (from the French résumé) and haček (from the Czech háček) because of the change in pronunciation of the initial vowels. Complete naturalization stripping all diacritics also has occurred, in words such as canyon, from the Spanish cañón. Also for accurate readings, some speech writers differentiate lēad (pronounced like leed) and lĕad (pronounced like led). Not to be forgotten are adjectives such as learnèd and belovèd which are pronounced with two and three syllables respectively, unlike the past participles learned and beloved which are each pronounced with one fewer syllable.

Regional differences

Canada

In Canadian English, words of French origin retain their orthography more often than in other English-speaking countries, such as the usage of é (e with acute) in café, Montréal, née, Québec, and résumé. This is due to the large influence afforded by French being one of Canada's two official languages at the federal government level as well as at the provincial level in New Brunswick, and the majority and sole official language in Québec.

New Zealand

In New Zealand English, words derived from the Māori language now commonly include the macron where appropriate.^[12][13]

Names with diacritics

Diacritics are used in the names of some English-speaking people:

• British: Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë (and other members of the Brontë family), Noël Coward, Zoë Wanamaker, Zoë Ball, Emeli Sandé, John le Carré
• American: Beyoncé Knowles, Chloë Grace Moretz, Chloë Sevigny, Renée Fleming, Renée Zellweger, Zoë Baird, Donté Stallworth, John C. Frémont, Robert M. Gagné
• Australian: Renée Geyer, Zoë Badwi

Typographical limitations

The early days of metal type printing quickly faced problems of not just simple diacritical marks for English, and accents for French and German, but also musical notation (for sheet music printing) and Greek and Hebrew alphabets (for Bible printing).^[14] However problems with representation of diacritical marks continued even in scholarly publishing and dissertations up to the word processor era.^[15] The first generation of word processors also had character set limitations,^[16] and confusion due to typesetting convention was exacerbated in the character coded environment due to limitations of the ASCII character set.^[17]

References

See also

• Wiktionary:Appendix:English words with diacritics
• Lists of English words by country or language of origin
• List of French expressions in English
• List of German expressions in English