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The grave accent ( ` ) ( /ˈɡreɪv/ or UK /ˈɡrɑːv/)^[1] is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek (until 1982; see polytonic orthography), Italian, Macedonian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Ligurian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.

Uses[link]

Pitch[link]

Greek[link]

The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography 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.^[2] 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.

Stress[link]

The grave accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in Catalan and Italian.

General rule is that in Italian words ending with stressed -a, -i, -o, -u must be marked with a grave accent. So only words ending with stressed -e may bear both an acute accent or a grave accent (closed 'e' sound vs. open 'e' sound). Some examples are: città "city", morì "[he/she] died", virtù "virtue", Mosè "Moses", portò "[he/she/it] brought, carried". Especially with capital letters, or when using a keyboard without accented letters, an apostrophe is sometimes used instead of the proper accent, thus E’ instead of È "[he/she/it] is", though it is technically an error. Other mistakes arise from the misunderstanding of truncated and elided words: for example the phrase un po’, meaning "a little", which is the truncated version of un poco, is infrequently spelt as un pò. In Italian there are many pairs of words, one with an accent marked 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-homophones: 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.

In Ligurian, the grave accent marks the accented short vowel of a word in à (sound [a]), è (sound [ɛ]), ì (sound [i]) and ù (sound [y]). In the case of ò, it is used for the short sound of [O], but it may not be the stressed vowel of the word.

Height[link]

The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced open: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Roman languages:

• Catalan uses the accent on three letters (a, e, and o).
• French 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 schwa, like in lever [ləve].
• Italian
• Occitan
• Ligurian, which also uses the grave accent to distinguish the sound [O] (written ò) from the sound [u], written ó.

Disambiguation[link]

The grave accent is used to distinguish homophones in several languages:

• Catalan, where it distinguishes, for example, ma ("my") from mà ("hand").
• French. 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 article 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").
• Italian, 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 Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk), 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 accent.
• 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[link]

In Welsh, 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.

Tone[link]

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese 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.

Other uses[link]

In Portuguese, 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.

English[link]

The grave accent, although not standardly applied to any English 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").

Italics, 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.

[edit] Technical notes

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.^[3]

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.

Use in programming[link]

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 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 (“). It is also used for using the numeric ASCII value of an ASCII character wherever a number is expected.

Many of the Unix shells and the programming languages 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 Tue Jun 26 16:38:04 GMT 2012

which then on execution produces the output:

It is now Tue Jun 26 16:38:04 GMT 2012

In the Bash shell, the `...` is deprecated in favour of $(...).^[4] The same is true of Z shell.^[5]

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 $ inside double quotes.

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 Tom_(pattern_matching_language)Tom, the backquote is used to create a new term or to call an existing term.

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 `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 is specified in PowerShell as [Nullable``1[System.Boolean]].

Prior to Python 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 reStructuredText 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 `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, 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.

See also[link]

• Acute accent
• Circumflex
• Double grave accent

References[link]

External links[link]

• 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

Look up à or è in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.