Accent Marks: Trema, Umlaut, Macron, Circumflex

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

Diacritic (aka Diacritical Mark)

Accent mark is called Diacritic.

example: é è ê ë ç ā â ǎ ñ å

Common Diacritic

Here's a list of common diacritics and their names.

acute accent ´
e.g. café, décor, déjà vu, résumé, risqué, Chopin's prélude, étude, fiancée, Ingénue.

é is heavily used in French. 〔see French Keyboard Layout〕

grave accent `
e.g. crème de la crème, ménage à trois.

〔see Murray Head - One Night in Bangkok 🎵〕

circumflex ˆ
e.g. coup de grâce, mêlée (e.g. melee weapon in gaming.), my rôle, raison d'être.
diaeresis, umlaut ¨
e.g. zoölogy, reënact, naïve, Chloë.

The characters ä ö ü are used in German language. They are called umlaut. 〔see German Keyboard Layout〕

cedilla ¸
e.g. façade.
macron ¯

indicate a long vowel. in IPA 〔see Unicode IPA æ〕, MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON ː is used instead.

In Chinese pinyin, it's used to indicate mid-tone. 〔see Pinyin 拼音, Zhuyin 注音, IPA Comparison〕

breve ˘
indicates a short vowel
caron ˇ
used in Baltic, Slavic, Finnic, and others.

In Chinese pinyin, it's used to indicate 3rd-tone. 〔see Pinyin 拼音, Zhuyin 注音, IPA Comparison〕

TILDE ~
not an accent mark. Mostly used as ñ e.g. niña , meaning girl. It is a distinct letter in Spanish.

Diaeresis vs Umlaut

Diaeresis:

Historically, diaeresis and umlaut refer to two distinct phonological phenomena.

The diaeresis is used to denote the phenomenon also known as diaeresis, or hiatus, in which a vowel letter is not part of a digraph or diphthong. e.g. “cooperation”.

“Umlaut” refers to a historical sound shift in German. In German, umlauts are found as ä, ö and ü. The name is used in some other languages that share these symbols with German or where the Latin spelling was introduced in the 19th century, replacing marks that had been used previously. The phonological phenomenon of umlaut occurred historically in English as well (man ~ men; full ~ fill; goose ~ geese) in a way cognately parallel with German, but English orthography does not write the sound shift using the umlaut diacritic. Instead, a different letter is used.

The two diacritical uses originated separately, with the diaeresis being considerably older. Nevertheless, in modern computer systems using Unicode, the umlaut and diaeresis diacritics are identical: ⟨ä⟩ represents both a-umlaut and a-diaeresis.

Wikipedia has nice and complete explanations on other Diacritic.

Examples of Diacritics

Complete List of Diacritic