A Tale of a Few Diacritics
By: German Enik
Tags: Language, Linguistics, Names, Diacritics, Globalization

What happens when you see a word that’s mostly made up of letters from the English alphabet, but with a few marks below or above? For instance, Noël or café. Or jalapeño, if you’re into spicy stuff. Unless you’ve seen them before, you would probably adopt the most intuitive pronunciation by omitting the marks and move on. Saying things in your head tends to be easier than out loud.

Some examples of diacritics (in red). Image credit.

Those little marks are called diacritics, and they’re pretty rare in the English language. They’re mostly present in loan words from other languages, like French or Spanish.

However, in our increasingly interconnected world, diacritics appear more and more in another place: names. Some of your friends, coworkers, and acquaintances may carry one or more diacritics in their last and/or first names.

In this article, you’ll learn a few fun facts about diacritics and hear from people who live with diacritics in their names. I’m not going to teach you how to pronounce every possible letter with a diacritic — simply because I myself don’t know, and I don’t want to get into the tedious phonetic transcriptions. My greatest hope is that you learn to not fear the diacritics: they may be something new or foreign to you, but don’t let the little strokes freak you out.

Lean into the unknown, be linguistically aware, and learn from others!

Image credit.

What exactly are these diacritics?

A diacritic is just a symbol added to a letter. Here are some examples with the latin letter a: à, á, â, ä, ã, å, ā. Their purpose really ranges from a language to a language, so you should try to not make an assumption that a letter with a diacritic sounds very similar to itself without it.

Furthermore, a letter with a diacritic can sometimes be equivalently represented with a digraph, or a pair of letters. Different languages based on non-Latin scripts may use different romanization schemes; for instance, the Cyrillic letter ч can be romanized as a letter with the inverted circumflex diacritic (č) or a digraph (ch), depending on whether it’s being transliterated from Serbian or Russian, respectively.

Let’s briefly expand our horizons and look beyond alphabetic scripts like Latin and Cyrillic! For instance, Arabic and Hebrew scripts (called impure abjad scripts) use diacritics to represent vowels. This is exactly why these abjads are impure; historically, they used to be written without any vowels at all (imagine reading that!), like pure abjads are. Additionally, the Devanagari script (called an abugida script) used by a lot of languages in India also employs diacritics to denote vowels as well as an absence of one.

Different diacritics (in red and blue) used in Hebrew. Image credit.

The remainder of this article will focus on Latin diacritics (such as ü, ł, ê), but if you’re curious to learn more about their use in other writing scripts (abjads, abugidas, syllabaries, etc.), let me know in the comments!

Key takeaways: Do not make assumptions. The linguistic diversity of our world is puzzling, and the the same letter with a diacritic may sound different depending on where it’s from.

Interviews

When I started my internship at a company in the Sillicon Valley in June, I was amazed by my team members’ cultural diversity.

Olof

One of the first things I did was schedule a virtual coffee chat with my colleague Olof Åkerlund. I was beyond curious to ask him about the mysterious letter Å in his last name.

Swedish alphabet, with vowels in red and consonants in black. Image credit.

Olof is a software engineer from Sweden; he was happy to share a bunch of fun facts about his culture with me.

Swedish uses a total of 29 letters—the same 26 as English and three extra vowels: Å, Ä, and Ö. Note that the three vowels are NOT considered modified A’s and O; they are their own letters and don’t sound like what you may think at first.

Olof explained that the the first letter of his last name — Å — was initially formed as the digraph OA and eventually morphed into the A with a ring above. Regarding the sound, it sounds like oar without the r at the end.

Olof sometimes has to substitute his letter Å with A in order to adjust to the digital environment.“U.S. ‘legal names’ have to be 7-bit ASCII, so I don’t write it. But when Unicode is an option, I write it out.”

Olof also brought up a historical anecdote. “Interesting thing: my first manager was Lee Collins, one of the inventors of Unicode. He was personally upset by all my troubles.”

Lastly, Olof added: “I’m not concerned if people ask me about [my last name]”.

2. Karan

A diacritic is not always assigned at birth. Sometimes, it is a conscious choice, like in the case of Karan Miśra, the my team’s engineering manager. I emailed Karan inquiring about differences between his last name and Mishra, one of my friend Katie’s last name. This was his response:

Indeed, this is the same family name as “Mishra” (मिश्र). As far as spelling goes, there’s a 90/10 split with the majority of people spelling it as “Mishra” and a minority spelling it as “Misra”. For some reason, my ancestors chose to anglicize it as “Misra”, perhaps because many varieties of Hindi do not distinguish the स (s) and श (sh) consonants and pronounce both as स (s) thus leading to this spelling. Regardless, I have chosen — stylistically — to spell it as “Miśra” because ‘ś’ indicates श (sh) in most standard romanization schemes for the Devanagari script, and to those who know, it will indicate that it is pronounced with श , not स.

Some examples of the Devanagari script. Image credit.

3. Danny

A lot of the times, people choose to omit their diacritics. My manager Danny Nguyen is Vietnamese Canadian. I knew that Vietnamese language uses most diacritics to indicate tones, so I messaged Danny to ask if his name has any.

Vietnamese words with diacritics. Image credit.

Turns out that in Vietnamese, Danny’s last name is actually Nguyễn. Danny explained: “Most Vietnamese people omit those diacritics when in the U.S. out of convenience, but they are always used when living in Vietnam.”

Whether people choose to preserve, annex, or omit diacritics to their names, all you need to do is respect their preference. Their name, their choice.

Key takeaways: Letters that look alike don’t necessarily sound alike. If you examine the English alphabet, letters O and Q look extremely similar, yet we all know they don’t have anything phonetic in common.

And finally, don’t be afraid to ask people about their names!