page_title: Irish orthography
section_title: Diacritics
hierarchical_section_title: Irish orthography / Diacritics
caption_attribution_description: English: Gaeltacht road sign in County Donegal. Text on the sign is in Irish and translates as follows: "Donegal County Council. This work has been financed by the Department of Arts, Heritage, Gaeltacht and the Islands"
context_page_description: Irish orthography has evolved over many centuries, since Old Irish was first written down in the Latin alphabet in about the 8th century AD. Prior to that, Primitive Irish was written in Ogham. Irish orthography is mainly based on etymological considerations, although a spelling reform in the mid-20th century simplified the relationship between spelling and pronunciation somewhat.
  There are three main dialect areas of spoken Irish: Ulster, Connacht, and Munster. Some spelling conventions are common to all three dialects, while others vary from dialect to dialect. In addition, individual words may have in a given dialect pronunciations that are not reflected by their spelling.
context_section_description: Irish spelling makes use today of only one diacritic, and formerly used a second. The acute accent (Irish: síneadh fada "long sign") is used to indicate a long vowel, as in bád /bˠaːd̪ˠ/ "boat". However, there are some circumstances under which a long vowel is not indicated by an acute, namely:
  before rd, rl, rn, rr, for example ard /aːɾˠd̪ˠ/ "high", eirleach /ˈeːɾˠlʲəx/ "destruction", dorn /d̪ˠoːɾˠn̪ˠ/ "fist"
  in the groups ae, ao, eo, for example aerach /ˈeːɾˠəx/ "gay", maol /mˠiːl̪ˠ/ "bare", ceol /coːl̪ˠ/ "music"
  in the groups omh(a) and umh(a), for example comharsa /ˈkoːɾˠsˠə/ "neighbour", Mumhain /mˠuːnʲ/ "Munster"
  long /iː/ and /uː/ before /aː/ or /oː/, e.g. fiáin /ˈfʲiːaːnʲ/ "wild", ruóg /ˈɾˠuːoːɡ/ "twine"
  The overdot (Irish: ponc séimhithe "dot of lenition", buailte "struck", or simply séimhiú, "lenition") was formerly used, especially in Gaelic script, to indicate the lenited version of a consonant; currently a following letter h is used for this purpose. Thus the letters ḃ ċ ḋ ḟ ġ ṁ ṗ ṡ ṫ are equivalent to bh ch dh fh gh mh ph sh th. In Old Irish orthography, the dot was used only for ḟ ẛ (ṡ), while the following h was used for ch ph th; lenition of other letters was not indicated. Later the two systems spread to the entire set of lenitable consonants and competed with each other. Eventually the standard practice was to use the dot when writing in Gaelic script and the following h when writing in Roman letters.
  As with most European languages such as French, Spanish or German, Irish diacritics must be preserved in uppercase forms. If diacritics are unavailable (for example, on a computer using ASCII), there is no generally accepted standard for replacing it (unlike some languages like German, where the umlaut is replaced by a following e and ß is replaced by ss), and so it is generally just omitted entirely or replaced with an apostrophe (especially in names, for example Dara O'Briain rather than Dara Ó Briain).
  Lower-case i has no tittle in Gaelic script, and road signs in the Republic of Ireland, which use a typeface based on Transport, also use a dotless lowercase i (as well as a Latin alpha glyph for a). However, as printed and electronic material like books, newspapers and web pages use Roman hand almost invariably, the tittle is generally shown but it is not a diacritic and has no significance. (In Irish, the graphemic distinction between dotted i and dotless ı does not arise, i.e. they are not different letters as they are in, for example, Turkish and Azeri).
  According to Alexei Kondratiev, the dotless i was developed by monks in the manuscripts to denote the modification of the letter following it. In the word go deimhin for example, the first i would be dotless, softening the m, and the second dotted i would be a normal vowel. The dotting of every occurrence of i in Irish became a convention, as did the letter h, when the language became more usually typed than handwritten, and the limitations of the machine to accommodate a scribe's flicks and notations imposed standardization. This meant that "letters" that were more intended to modify other letters (h and dotless i) became equal letters.
caption: Road sign in the Donegal Gaeltacht: Note Comhaırle, obaır, maoınıú, Roınn, Oıdhreachta and Oıleán with dotless lowercase i's.
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