Diacritics - CSS Typography | CSS: Presentation Layer

Diacritics are the various little dots and squiggles which, in many languages, are written above, below or on top of certain letters of the alphabet to indicate something about their pronunciation. Thus, French has words like été `summer', août `August', ça `that' and père `father'; German has Wörter `words' and tschüss `good-bye'; Spanish has mañana `tomorrow' and ángel `angel'; Norwegian has brød `bread' and frå `from'; Polish has Nza `tear', ^@le `badly' and pica `five'; Turkish has ku^@ `bird' and göz `eye'; Welsh has t^@ `house' and sïo `hiss', and so on. When you are citing a word, a name or a passage from a foreign language which uses diacritics, you should make every effort to reproduce those diacritics faithfully. Fortunately, most word processors can produce at least the commoner diacritics.

Diacritics are loosely called accents.

Typical used when citing names, places, titles of literay/musical work.

The French politician is François Mitterrand, the Spanish golfer is José-María Olazábal, the Polish linguist is Jerzy KuryNowicz, the Turkish national hero is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the beleaguered town in the former Yugoslavia is Gora^@de, Wagner's opera is the Götterdämmerung and the French film is Zazie dans le Métro. So far as you can produce them, therefore, these are the forms you should use even when writing in English. But don't overdo it. If an accepted English form exists, use that: write Munich, not München, Montreal, not Montréal, The Magic Flute, not Die Zauberflöte.

Diacritics in English

Diacritics are not typically used in English, however they do occur in three situations:

Borrowed Words Not Fully Anglicized

Foreign words/phrases borrowed into English that have not been fully anglicized. These terms should be written with original diacritics as well as be italicized (to show their foreign status).

Lloyd George was the Tories' bête noire.

She was an artist manqué.

The Wörter und Sachen approach is favoured by some etymologists.

When a word becomes anglicized they are typically treated as ordinary English words, hence, its normal to write cafe, rather than café, to write naive, rather than naïve, and cortege, rather than cortège.

Note: anglicized words that are treated as ordinary English words are not normally italicized; they are in the previous paragraph simply to draw attention to them.

Diaeresis (¨)

A diaeresis (¨)is a particular diacritic written in English to express that a vowel is pronounced separately. One familiar example is Zoë, or the surname Brontë.

Some authors write coöperate, rather than cooperate, and aërate, rather than aerate, however these are outdated and not recommended.