Double grave accent

The double grave accent is a diacritic used in scholarly discussions of the Serbo-Croatian and sometimes Slovene languages. It is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, double grave accent is used to indicate a short falling tone, though in discussion of Slovenian, a single grave accent is also often used for this purpose. The double grave accent is found in both Latin and Cyrillic; however, it is not used in the everyday orthography of either language, only in discussions of the phonology of these languages.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the double grave accent is used to indicate extra-low tone.

The letters a e i o r u and their Cyrillic equivalents а е и о р у can all be found with the double grave accent. Unicode provides precomposed characters for the uppercase and the lowercase Latin letters but not the Cyrillic letters. The Cyrillic letters can be formed using the combining character for the double grave, which is located at U+030F. The combining character can also be used with IPA vowel symbols, if necessary.

Grave accent

The grave accent ( ` ) (/ˈɡreɪv/ or UK /ˈɡrɑːv/) is a diacritical mark used in many written languages, including Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek (until 1982; see polytonic orthography), Haitian Creole, Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Ligurian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh and Yoruba.

Uses

Greek

The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek to mark a lower pitch than the high pitch of the acute accent. In modern practice, it is used to replace an acute accent in the last syllable of a word when the word is followed immediately by another word in the sentence. The grave and circumflex have been replaced with an acute accent in the modern monotonic orthography.

Stress

The grave accent marks the stressed vowels of words in Maltese, Catalan and Italian.