Grave accent

The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese and other languages.

In Greek the grave accent occurs only on the last syllable of a word, in cases where the normal high tone (indicated by an acute accent) was lowered in Ancient Greek because of a following word in the same sentence. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent.

In French, the grave accent has two uses. On the letter e it marks the distinct quality of the vowel: è [ɛ], and e [ə]. On the letters a and u it has no effect on pronunciation and only serves to distinguish homonyms that are otherwise spelled the same. It distinguishes the preposition à ("to") and the verb a (present tense of avoir), as well as distinguishing là ("there") and the feminine definite article la; it is also used in the word déjà and the phrase çà et là. It is used only to distinguish où ("where") and ou ("or"). In those French comic books which are hand-lettered all in capitals, the symbol is very short atop the E or U, but slides down on the right of the A, not descending past the cross-bar, though.

In Catalan, the grave accent (or accent obert as it's called in this language) is used to mark both the stress and the distinct quality of certain stressed vowels, such as è [ɛ] versus é [e], or such as ò [ɔ] versus ó [o]. The letter a is the only one that takes the grave accent but not the acute, while i and u can only take the acute (accent tancat in Catalan). It is used sometimes to distinguish words with different meanings but exact pronunciation (homophones): compare ma (my) and mà (hand).

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 ("a mug") versus mwg ("smoke").

In Italian, it marks final stress, as in virtù ("virtue") or città ("city") or as in è ("it is"). When the accented character is unavailable, an apostrophe is used instead; this is particularly evident with the capitalised form È, a common beginning for a sentence yet absent from Italian keyboard layouts, which is almost always replaced with E'.

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone.

In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel.

In Norwegian (both bokmål and Nynorsk), the grave accent is used to indicate stress on a syllable that would otherwise be unstressed. This also differentiates between certain words, e.g. og ("and") and òg ("also"). Popular usage, possibly because Norwegian rarely uses diacritics, does not respect these rules much, and there is a certain interchangeability with the acute accent.

In Portuguese, the grave accent indicates a crasis, usually between the preposition a and an article or a pronoun beginning with another a. For example, instead of a aquele one writes àquele.

In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform, a grave accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the third representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus u is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value [u], while ù transliterates the third sign with the value [u] (usually used for "and").

The grave accent is used in English only in poetry and song lyrics. It indicates 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 as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced—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, from the adjective learnèd.

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, crème brûlée.

The word grave is derived from the Latin gravis (heavy), itself a translation of the Greek barys (βαρύς). In English the word is normally pronounced "grahv" (IPA [ɡɹɑːv]), in other words not like grave meaning serious or a tomb. It comes from French, where it is pronounced similarly: accent grave ([aksɑ̃ ɡʁav])).

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. Unicode also provides the grave accent as a combining character.

In the ASCII character set the grave accent is encoded as character 96, hex 60. Outside the U.S. character 96 is often replaced by the local currency symbol. Many much older UK computers have the £ symbol as character 96.

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. However, programmers have used the key by itself for a number of tasks.

In many PC based computer games, the grave accent key is often used to open the console window, allowing the user to execute commands via a CLI.

When using TeX to typeset text, the grave accent on its own is used in lieu of a dedicated open-quote key. For example, ` becomes a single opening quote (‘) and `` becomes a double opening quote (“). Compared to algorithmic ‘quote education’ available in modern word processors, this method has the advantage of it becoming completely unambiguous (consider ‘the ’60s’ or the archaic ‘’twas’ – most modern word processors would incorrectly render these as ‘the ‘60s’ and ‘‘twas’, respectively). The primary disadvantage is that it requires the user to adjust to this style.

Many of the UNIX shells and the programming language Perl use pairs of this character—known as backquote or backtick—to indicate substitution of the standard output from one command into a line of text defining another command.

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 Pico, the backquote is used to indicate comments in the programming language.

In Verilog the grave accent is used to help define a size constant (for example, 2`b01). Accidental use of an apostrophe instead of a grave accent is one of the top five beginner mistakes in the language.

In Unlambda, the backquote character denotes function application.

• 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