A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is primarily a noun, though it is sometimes used as an adjective, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ´ ) and grave ( ` ), are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
English orthography is the system of writing conventions used to represent spoken English in written form that allows readers to connect spelling to sound to meaning.
The acute accent, ´, is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.
The circumflex is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin: circumflexus "bent around"—a translation of the Greek: περισπωμένη. The circumflex in the Latin script is chevron-shaped, while the Greek circumflex may be displayed either like a tilde or like an inverted breve.
Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Inari Sami, Romanian, and Vietnamese alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Friulian, Frisian, Portuguese, Turkish, Walloon, and Welsh languages as a variant of letter “a”.
Î, î (i-circumflex) is a letter in the Friulian, Kurdish, Old Malay and Romanian alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Turkish, Italian, Welsh and Walloon languages as a variant of letter “i”.
Catalan orthography encompasses the spelling and punctuation of the Catalan language.
The phonological history of the English language includes various changes in the phonology of consonant clusters.
The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. All nouns have a conventional grammatical gender. Countable nouns inflect for number. However, the division between uncountable and countable nouns is more ambiguous than in English.
The Persian language has between six and eight vowel phonemes and twenty-six consonant phonemes. It features contrastive stress and syllable-final consonant clusters.
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into
-ing is a suffix used to make one of the inflected forms of English verbs. This verb form is used as a present participle, as a gerund, and sometimes as an independent noun or adjective. The suffix is also found in certain words like morning and ceiling, and in names such as Browning.
The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in English, French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages. It is also used in other languages using the Latin alphabet, such as Mohawk and Yoruba, and with non-Latin writing systems such as the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and the Bopomofo or Zhuyin Fuhao semi-syllabary. It has no single meaning, but can indicate pitch, stress, or other features.
Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis was abolished by the last Orthography Agreement. Accented letters and digraphs are not counted as separate characters for collation purposes.
The phonology of Turkish is the pronunciation of the Turkish language. It deals with current phonology and phonetics, particularly of Istanbul Turkish. A notable feature of the phonology of Turkish is a system of vowel harmony that causes vowels in most words to be either front or back and either rounded or unrounded. Velar stop consonants have palatal allophones before front vowels.
Malecite–Passamaquoddy is an endangered Algonquian language spoken by the Maliseet and Passamaquoddy peoples along both sides of the border between Maine in the United States and New Brunswick, Canada. The language consists of two major dialects: Malecite, which is mainly spoken in the Saint John River Valley in New Brunswick; and Passamaquoddy, spoken mostly in the St. Croix River Valley of eastern Maine. However, the two dialects differ only slightly, mainly in accent. The indigenous people widely spoke Malecite-Passamaquoddy in these areas until around the post-World War II era when changes in the education system and increased marriage outside of the speech community caused a large decrease in the number of children who learned or regularly used the language. As a result, in both Canada and the U.S. today, there are only 600 speakers of both dialects, and most speakers are older adults. Although the majority of younger people cannot speak the language, there is growing interest in teaching the language in community classes and in some schools.
In the Lithuanian language, heavy syllables may be pronounced in one of two prosodically distinct ways that are determined by accent and pitch. One way is the acute or falling accent. It may be described as sudden, sharp or rough. The phrase tvirtaprãdė príegaidė has the literal meaning "firm-start accent". The second way is the circumflex or rising accent. It may be described as continued, mild or smooth. The word tvirtagãlė has the literal meaning "firm-end". Short syllables may have stress without the differentiation of an accent.
Uyghur is a Turkic language spoken mostly in the west of China.
Proto-Slavic is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately from the 2nd millennium B.C. through the 6th century A.D. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; scholars have reconstructed the language by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic languages and by taking into account other Indo-European languages.
Port Talbot English (PTE) is a variety of Welsh English spoken in Port Talbot, generally by the working class.
