English terms with diacritical marks


Some English language terms have letters with diacritical marks. Most of the words are loanwords from French, with others coming from Spanish, Portuguese, German, or other languages. The grave accent and the diaeresis mark are the only diacritics native to Modern English, but their usage is considered to be largely archaic.
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.
Unlike continental European languages, English orthography tends to use digraphs rather than diacritics to indicate more sounds that can be accommodated by the letters of the Latin alphabet. Unlike other systems where the spelling indicates the pronunciation, English spelling is highly varied, and diacritics alone would be insufficient to make it reliably phonetic.

Types of diacritical marks

Though limited, the following diacritical marks in English may be encountered, particularly for marking in poetry:
In representing European personal names, anthroponyms, and place names, toponyms, the following are often encountered:
For a more complete list see diacritical marks.

Special characters

Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" from "special characters" such as Old English and Icelandic eth and thorn, and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ, and German eszett.
The reverse of "special characters" is when foreign digraphs, such as Welsh ll in Llanelli, Dutch ij, or Croatian nj 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 – 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. The New Yorker and MIT Technology Review under Jason Pontin have maintained such usage as house styles.
The diaeresis mark is also in rare cases used over a single vowel to show that it is pronounced separately. It is often omitted in printed works because the sign is missing on modern keyboards.
The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous or nonstandard for metrical reasons ; the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced.

In historical versions of English

The Old English Latin alphabet began to replace the Runic alphabet in the 8th century, due to the influence of Celtic Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The orthography of Old English – which was entirely handwritten in its own time – was not well standardized, though it did not use all the Latin letters, and included several letters not present in the modern alphabet. When reprinted in modern times, an overdot is occasionally used with two Latin letters to differentiate sounds for the reader:
Some modern printings also apply diacritics to vowels following the rules of Old Norse normalized spelling developed in the 19th century.
In the Late Middle English period, the shape of the English letter þ, which was derived from the Runic alphabet, evolved in some handwritten and blackletter texts to resemble the Latin letter y. The þ shape survived into the era of printing presses only as far as the press of William Caxton. In later publications, thorn was represented by "y", or by ẏ to distinguish thorn from y. By the end of the Early Modern English period, thorn had been completely replaced in contemporary usage by the digraph "th", and the overdot was no longer needed outside of printings of very old texts. The overdot is missing from the only surviving usage of a Y-shaped thorn, in the archaic stock phrase ye olde.

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. During this process there is a tendency for accents and other diacritics that were present in the donor language to be dropped.
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.
Words that retain their accents often do so to help indicate pronunciation, or to help distinguish them from an unaccented English word. Technical terms or those associated with specific fields are less likely to lose their accents.
Some Spanish words with the Spanish letter ñ have been naturalised by substituting English ny. 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. 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 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 written without the umlaut even alongside other German and Swiss names that retain the umlaut in English.

Accent-addition and accent-removal

As words are naturalized into English, sometimes diacritics are added to imported words that originally did not 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 a diphthongised "e" sound at the end, rather than the e being silent. Examples of a partial removal include resumé and haček 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. For accurate readings, some speech writers use diacritics to differentiate homographs, such as lēad and lĕad. 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 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 Manitoba, and the majority and sole official language in Québec.

New Zealand

includes words derived from the Maori language, which uses a macron to indicate vowel length. In English, the vowel length of these words is indicated in three ways: no change, doubling the vowel, or using a macron. An umlaut has sometimes been used in place of a macron where the technical capacity to display a macron is limited. Since 2000, macrons are increasingly common in New Zealand English; both of the main newspaper chains had adopted macrons in their print and online editions in May 2018.

Names with diacritics

Diacritics are used in the names of some English-speaking people:
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 and Greek and Hebrew alphabets. However problems with representation of diacritical marks continued even in scholarly publishing and dissertations up to the word processor era. Mechanical typewriter keyboards manufactured for English-speaking countries seldom include diacritics.
The first generation of word processors also had character set limitations, and confusion due to typesetting convention was exacerbated in the character coded environment due to limitations of the ASCII character set.