For example, the French hôtel is simply hotel in English.Įven when writing in English, you may encounter loanwords or foreign language words that do make use of many different kinds of diacritical marks. Because English loves to be weird, though, foreign language loanwords sometimes drop their diacritical marks when written in English. When writing English, you’ll typically only need to use them when writing loanwords from other languages, such as the French cliché or the Spanish piñata. That being said, English rarely uses diacritical marks-even though it probably could really benefit from them. Some reasons that diacritical marks might be used include indicating which syllable of a word should be stressed, if a vowel is long or short, or to separate one word from another that has an identical spelling and/or pronunciation. The specific reason behind the usage of a particular diacritical mark will depend on the mark itself and, often, which language it is used in. What is a diacritical mark?Ī diacritical mark, also known as a diacritic, refers to any mark, shape, stroke, or sign added or attached to a letter for a particular reason. Our quick guide should help you sort all of this out. At the same time, you might want to know how you’d actually type any of these marks using a keyboard. That’s nice and all, but you might be wondering what these marks actually mean and whether or not we ever use them in English.

The non-linguists among us may know these lines and shapes as accent marks, but their true name is diacritical marks or diacritics.

All of these words have strange lines and symbols above at least one of the letters. What do all of these words have in common? No, it isn’t some weird logic puzzle.

E with an accent mark