Acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut: the difference

Five marks do almost all of the work in Western European writing, and they are constantly confused with one another. Here is what each one is actually for, language by language, plus the four marks that trip people up once they move east or north.

The acute: ´

Leans to the right. In most languages it marks stress, length or a closed vowel.

French uses it on one letter only. é is the closed e of été, café, école. There is no à with an acute, no ì, no ù. If you see an acute on any French vowel other than e, it is a mistake.

Spanish uses it on all five vowels, and the job is stress. It appears when the stress breaks the default rule (canción, árbol), when it splits a diphthong (país, río), and when it separates identical words: sí yes against si if, él he against el the, más more against mas but, qué what against que that.

Portuguese uses the acute for a stressed open vowel: pá, café, avó (grandmother). Compare avô (grandfather) with a circumflex, which is the closed one.

Italian uses it on final closed e and o: perché, né, ventitré.

Polish calls it a kreska and puts it on consonants too: ć, ń, ś, ź, plus ó which is pronounced like u.

The grave: `

Leans to the left. It is the acute’s opposite in almost every language that has both.

French allows it on three vowels. On e it marks the open sound: père, très, problème. On a and u it does nothing to pronunciation and simply separates homophones: à (to) from a (has), où (where) from ou (or).

Italian requires it on any word stressed on a final vowel: città, caffè, così, però, più. The single most useful one is è (is) against e (and).

Portuguese uses it for exactly one thing, the merging of two a sounds: à, às, àquele. Nothing else.

Catalan splits them by vowel quality: à è ò are the open ones, é í ó ú the closed.

The circumflex: ˆ

The little roof. Often a fossil.

French circumflexes usually mark a letter that fell out of the word centuries ago, almost always an s. Hôtel was hostel, forêt was forest, île was isle, pâte was paste. Compare the English cognates and the missing s is right there. It also separates dû from du and sûr from sur.

Portuguese uses it for a stressed closed vowel: câmara, você, avô. This is the acute’s counterpart, not a fossil.

Romanian uses â and î for the same sound, a central vowel written two ways depending on position: român, pâine, but în, început.

Turkish uses it optionally to separate kâr (profit) from kar (snow) and hâlâ (still) from hala (aunt).

The tilde, and the Spanish trap

Spanish puts it on one letter: ñ, which is a separate letter of the alphabet, sitting between n and o. Here is the trap. In Spanish, the word tilde usually means the acute stress mark on á é í ó ú. The squiggle over the n has its own name, virgulilla. So a Spanish speaker asking about “la tilde” is probably asking about accents in general, not about ñ.

Portuguese calls it til and uses it to nasalise vowels: ã and õ in mão, pão, nação, põe, corações.

The ASCII ~ on your keyboard is a third thing again, a punctuation character, not an accent. More on that in Common accent mistakes and the confusable characters.

The two dots: umlaut or diaeresis?

Same mark, same Unicode character, two completely different jobs.

An umlaut marks a vowel that changed. German ä, ö and ü come from historical sound shifts and still drive grammar: Mann becomes Männer, Buch becomes Bücher, groß becomes größer. When the character is unavailable, German substitutes ae, oe and ue, which is why you see Mueller on forms.

A diaeresis says “pronounce this vowel separately from the one before it”. French Noël, naïf, maïs, Citroën. Dutch coëfficiënt, ruïne, België. Spanish uses it only in güe and güi to keep the u audible: pingüino, vergüenza, bilingüe.

The rule that follows: never substitute ae, oe or ue for a diaeresis. Naif is wrong, naief is worse. The ae substitution is a German convention only.

For Swedish and Finnish, ä and ö are not umlauts at all. They are independent letters, sorted after z.

The cedilla, and the comma that is not one

The cedilla is the hook under ç. In French, Portuguese and Catalan it softens c to an s sound before a, o and u: français, garçon, leçon, açúcar, coração, força, plaça. Without it those c letters would be hard. Turkish uses it differently, on ç for the ch sound in çay and on ş for sh in şeker.

Romanian looks similar and is not. Romanian ș and ț carry a comma below, a distinct Unicode character, and the Romanian Academy mandates it: școală, și, țară, preț. Legacy fonts and old keyboards produced the Turkish cedilla forms ş and ţ instead, so mixed spellings are everywhere in older Romanian text. If you are typing Romanian, use the comma letters.

Latvian ģ ķ ļ ņ are named “with cedilla” in Unicode but drawn as commas, and on the lowercase ģ the mark sits above the letter for legibility. Do not convert them to the Romanian comma characters.

The caron

The little v, called a háček in Czech, mäkčeň in Slovak, kvačica in Croatian. It turns a consonant into its palatal or hushing counterpart: č is ch as in chair, š is sh, ž is the s of measure.

Czech has the largest set: č ď ě ň ř š ť ž, and ř is essentially unique to Czech. On the tall letters ď and ť the caron is printed as an apostrophe-shaped stroke, which is a typographic variant, not a different character.

Do not confuse the caron with the breve. The caron is angular, like a v. The breve is rounded, like a u. Romanian ă is a breve, Czech č is a caron.

The rest, briefly

Mark	Letters	Where
Ring above	å, ů	Danish, Norwegian, Swedish; Czech dům, stůl
Ogonek	ą ę į ų	Polish nasal vowels, Lithuanian
Macron	ā ē ī ō ū	Latvian, Lithuanian, Māori, Hawaiian
Double acute	ő ű	Hungarian long ö and ü: kő, tűz
Breve	ă, ğ	Romanian schwa; Turkish ğ, which lengthens the vowel before it
Stroke	ł, ø, đ	Polish Łódź; Danish and Norwegian Tromsø
Dot above	ż, ė, İ	Polish, Lithuanian, Turkish capital İ

If you want the full inventory with Unicode detail, read What is a diacritic? Accent marks explained. To type any of these, see How to type accents on Windows (Alt codes and layouts), How to type accents on a Mac (Option key and press-and-hold) or The US International keyboard layout explained, with the code lists in Alt codes for accented letters: the complete verified list and HTML entity, Unicode and CSS codes for accented letters. Language by language, start at French, Spanish, German or Portuguese, or look up a single letter from Accent Letter.