Wearing Many Hats
Diacritics in the English Language
Have you ever been asked to wear a lot of hats, or whether you enjoy wearing a lot of hats? Personally I don’t like wearing hats at all because they mess up my hair, and I have great hair, so why would I want to cover it up in the first place? This phrase comes from the quaint idea that people wear a specific type of hat so you can look at them and tell what their job is, like a chef hat (this person cooks food) or a cowboy hat (this person rustles cattle, whatever that means).
Today’s Shelf Life is about the use of diacritics in the English language. I think of diacritics as a collection of fancy hats the glyphs wear when they are feeling festive. Just like with chefs and cowboys, the fun hats that letters wear tell you what job they do in the word you’re reading. Glyphs: They’re just like us. This is handy because it helps us know how to pronounce words and gives us more sounds that we might have with just our 26-letter alphabet alone.
When diacritics occur in an English word, they may be required or they may be optional. For instance, the piece of paper that has your work history on it, the one you submit with a job application, may be spelled resume or résumé. It’s the same word. (Per Merriam-Webster, the preferred spelling includes the two diacritics.) When diacritics appear on a word in another language, you should assume the diacritics are required and not optional—they may alter the meaning of the word, as in the case of años (years) and anos (buttholes).
When a diacritic is part of someone’s name, it must never be omitted. A person named Nöelle is not interchangeably called Noelle, and a person named José is not interchangeably Jose. This is as hard and fast a rule as “Catherine [my personal name] should never be spelled Katherine or Christine.”
Remember if you are talking about Jose Canseco that he does not use an acute accent on his e. It’s pronounced the same as José but spelled differently.
New York Times style has a rule that diacritics are only used for the Romance languages and German, and are not included for any other languages. Breaking news: Other languages also use diacritics. These are diacritical in every language in which they occur. (Here’s an article on this aspect of NYT style.) Note: When I say “Romance languages” I mean the languages descended from Latin, like French, Spanish, and Italian.
So anyway, today I’m going to go over the most commonly encountered diacritics, including their name, their purpose, and where you’re likely to encounter them.
Acute Accent
This is the diacritic that looks like an upward-slanting line and often appears over a vowel, as in: á, é, í, ó, ú. In French this is called the accent aigu, which means exactly the same thing. This accent is used for vowels in the Romance languages. These are not the only languages that use the acute accent and, further, it can be used on consonants as well. But you’re most likely—in English—to encounter it on vowels in names and loanwords from Romance languages.
The acute accent means “this letter is stressed.” But not like it’s stressed out and needs a vacation, more like you need to put stress on it when you speak it. That’s why the word résumé sounds like RAY soo MAY and not ree ZOOM. The vowel sound is spoken with more emphasis in that word. A vowel that might otherwise be silent is voiced if it has the acute accent on it.
Grave Accent
The grave accent is the mirror match of the acute accent. It’s a downward-slanting line that faces the opposite way as the acute, as in á, é, í, ó, ú. The grave is seen in several of the Romance languages, including French and Portuguese, as well as in many Western European languages.
In the languages that also use an acute accent, the grave accent means something different. For instance, in French the é is pronounced like AY (as in hay) while the é is pronounced like EH (as the first e in ever).
In some languages the grave accent is used to show that there is emphasis on the letter that has the grave, but that they are pronounced “lower,” or less sharply, than a letter that has the acute. For instance, the Italian word cittá.
Cedilla
The cedilla (seh DEE yuh) or cedille is not a hat but a cute little tail that is worn primarily by the letter C in French and Portuguese, among other languages: Ç or ç. The cedilla means “this C sounds like an S,” such as in façade or limaçon. In English, we often leave the cedilla out of these words, and that’s fine, because most English speakers don’t need to see the cedilla to know how to pronounce facade.
Caution: In Turkic languages, the ç is used to denote the sound we spell in English as sh (as in shower). This is a very different use than what English speakers are used to seeing in the Romance languages.
Umlaut
This is the diacritic people often put over vowels for no reason but to make them look Germanic or sound “metal.” It’s true—German does use a lot of umlauts and sounds metal as heck. The umlaut in German means that a vowel is rounded, which changes pronunciation significantly. The ä is pronounced like the “eh” sound in epigraph; ö is pronounced like the “er” sound in word; and ü is pronounced like the u sound in news.
Circumflex
The circumflex is the diacritic that most resembles a true hat. It looks like a little caret mark (^) over a vowel: â, ê, î, ô, û. In English we only see it on loanwords like crème brûlée and fête, and often not even then because many people don’t know how to make their keyboards display the circumflex.
In French (as the examples above), the circumflex means the vowel is pronounced longer than a vowel that does not have the circumflex—you stretch that vowel out just a little bit. (Which is just one of many ways you can accent a sound).
In other languages, the circumflex may indicate an accent or tonality (rising or falling tone, for example).
Tilde
The tilde is the wavy line above some letters that affects the way that letter is pronounced. It’s important to note that, in Spanish and related languages, the ñ is not “the letter n with a ~ over it” but a separate letter of the alphabet with a completely different pronunciation than n. In Spanish, the tilde is also called a virgulilla to distinguish it from other diacritics, which are also called tildes.
The letter Ñ is pronounced like the ny in “canyon” or the gna sound in “lasagna.”
Other languages, including Vietnamese and Estonian, use the tilde for other linguistic purposes. In Vietnamese, the tilde over a letter indicates rising pitch. In Estonian, õ (which is considered a separate letter from o) is used to indicate the close-mid back unrounded vowel, a sound similar to the way we might pronounce the “ul” in ulcer in English. (It’s not a vowel sound we use in English so I don’t have a great way to describe it to English speakers.)
There are a lot more diacritics than these—a whole world of them, and I could go on all day. But I’m going to wrap it up here and save the rest for a rainy day. In fact, I should have saved the circumflex, that rain hat of diacritics, for that rainy day. But it will still be here when I need it.
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