The grave accent ( ` ) ( /ˈɡreɪv/ or /ˈɡrɑːv/) is a diacritical mark in many written languages, including Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Frisian, Greek (until 1982; see polytonic orthography), Haitian Creole, Italian, Mohawk, Occitan, Portuguese, Ligurian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and Yoruba.
Contents
Pitch
The grave accent first appeared in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it replaces an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when that word is followed immediately by another word. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography.
The accent mark was called βαρεῖα, the feminine form of the adjective βαρύς (barús), meaning "heavy" or "low in pitch". This was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as gravis, which then became the English word grave.
Stress
The grave accent marks the stressed vowels of words in Maltese, Catalan, and Italian.
A general rule in Italian is that words that end with stressed -a, -i, -o, or -u must be marked with a grave accent. Words that end with stressed -e may bear either an acute accent or a grave accent, depending on whether the final e sound is closed or open, respectively. Some examples of words with a final grave accent are città ("city"), morì ("[he/she] died"), virtù ("virtue"), Mosè ("Moses"), and portò ("[he/she/it] brought/carried"). A typist who uses a keyboard without accented characters and is unfamiliar with input methods for typing accented letters sometimes use a separate grave accent or even an apostrophe instead of the proper accent. That is nonstandard. It is especially common when typing capital letters: E` or E’ instead of È ("[he/she/it] is"). Other mistakes arise from the misunderstanding of truncated and elided words: the phrase un po’ ("a little"), which is the truncated version of un poco, may be mistakenly spelled as un pò.
Italian has word pairs where one has an accent marked and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning—such as pero ("pear tree") and però ("but"), and Papa ("Pope") and papà ("dad"); the last example is also valid for Catalan.
In Bulgarian, the grave accent sometimes appears on the vowels а, о, у, е, и, and ъ to mark stress. It most commonly appears in books for children or foreigners, and dictionaries—or to distinguish between near-homophones: па̀ра ("steam/vapour") and пара̀ ("cent/penny, money"), въ̀лна ("wool") and вълна̀ ("wave"). In a few cases (mostly on the vowels е and и), the stress mark is orthographically required to distinguish homographs (see Disambiguation). Then, it forces the stress on the accented word-syllable instead of having a different syllable in the stress group getting accented. In turn, it changes the pronunciation and the whole meaning of the group.
Ukrainian, Rusyn, Belarusian, and Russian used a similar system until the first half of the 20th century. Now the main stress is preferably marked with an acute, and the role of the grave is limited to marking secondary stress in compound words (in dictionaries and linguistic literature).
In the descendants of Serbo-Croatian and in Slovene, the stressed syllable can be short or long and have a rising or falling tone. They use (in dictionaries, orthography, and grammar books, for example) four different stress marks (grave, acute, double grave, and inverted breve). The system is identical both in Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
In modern Church Slavonic, there are three stress marks (acute, grave, and circumflex). There is no phonetical distinction between them, only an orthographical one. The grave is typically used when the stressed vowel is the last letter of a multiletter word.
In Ligurian, the grave accent marks the accented short vowel of a word in à (sound [a]), è (sound [ɛ]), ì (sound [i]) and ù (sound [y]). For ò, it indicates the short sound of [o], but may not be the stressed vowel of the word.
Height
The grave accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o, indicating that they are pronounced open: è [ɛ] (as opposed to é [e]); ò [ɔ] (as opposed to ó [o]), in several Romance languages:
Disambiguation
In several languages, the grave accent distinguishes both homophones and words that otherwise would be homographs:
Length
In Welsh, the accent denotes a short vowel sound in a word that would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound: mẁg [mʊɡ] "mug" versus mwg [muːɡ] "smoke".
In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel. The use of acute accents to denote the rarer close long vowels, leaving the grave accents for the open long ones, is seen in older texts, but it is no longer allowed according to the new orthographical conventions.
Tone
In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese (when it is written in Hanyu Pinyin or Zhuyin Fuhao), the grave accent indicates a falling tone. The alternative to the grave accent in Mandarin is the numeral 4 after the syllable: pà = pa4.
In African languages, the grave accent often indicates a low tone: Nobiin jàkkàr ("fish-hook"), Yoruba àgbọ̀n ("chin"), Hausa màcè ("woman").
The grave accent represents the low tone in Kanien'kéha or Mohawk.
Other uses
In Emilian-Romagnol, a grave accent placed over e o denotes both length and openness. In Emilian è ò represent [ɛː, ɔː], while in Romagnol they represent [ɛ, ɔ].
In Portuguese, the grave accent indicates the contraction of two consecutive vowels in adjacent words (crasis). For example, instead of a aquela hora ("at that hour"), one says and writes àquela hora.
In Hawaiian, the grave accent is not placed over another character but is sometimes encountered as a typographically easier substitute for the ʻokina: Hawai`i instead of Hawaiʻi.
English
The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually-silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter. Most often, it is applied to a word that ends with -ed. For instance, the word looked is usually pronounced /ˈlʊkt/ as a single syllable, with the e silent; when written as lookèd, the e is pronounced: /ˈlʊkᵻd/ look-ed). In this capacity, it can also distinguish certain pairs of identically spelled words like the past tense of learn, learned /ˈlɜːrnd/, from the adjective learnèd /ˈlɜːrnᵻd/ (for example, "a very learnèd man").
Accents, sometimes combined with italics, are often applied to foreign terms not commonly used in or that are not fully assimilated into English: for example, vis-à-vis, pièce de résistance and crème brûlée.
As surrogate of apostrophe or (opening) single quote
The layout of some European PC keyboards combined with problematic keyboard driver semantics causes many users to use a grave accent or an acute accent instead of an apostrophe when typing in English (e.g. typing John`s or John´s instead of John's).
Additionally ASCII grave accent character (U+0060 ` Grave accent) was often used as surrogate of opening single quote, together with ASCII typewriter apostrophe (U+0027 ' Apostrophe) used as closing single quote; double quotes were sometimes substituted by two consecutive grave accents and two consecutive typewriter apostrophes (``…''). Although Unicode now provides separate characters for single and double quotes, such style is sometimes used even nowadays; examples are: output generated by some of UNIX console programs, rendering of man pages within some environments, technical documentation written long ago or written in old-school manner. However, as time goes on, such style is used less and less; and even institutions that traditionally were using that style are now abandoning it.