Map of quotation marks in European languages
jakubmarian.com
jakubmarian.com
For example, in Spanish, when I was a kid it was a given fact that exclamations and questions went between marks (¿? and ¡! respectively). Nowadays it's extremely rare to see opening marks - they exist in very formal contexts like books or newspapers, but even emails in the workplace got rid of them, and using them on social media or messaging apps would be just as weird as signing the message at the end.
Internet in western countries really is creating some kind of English-centered shockwave.
It's true (to a much lesser extent) in other languages. Japanese internet slang[2] is still very Japanese but has stuff directly borrowed or adapted from English for a lot of new tech.
I'm getting into sci-fi territory now, but I think the Belta Creole[3] of "The Expanse" shows a cool futuristic take on a blend of languages where English still has the bulk of the real estate.
[1] https://www.francaisfacile.com/exercices/exercice-francais-2...
[2] https://www.fluentu.com/blog/japanese/japanese-internet-slan...
In my view this is partly because of the 'focus' (or lack thereof) of the education system and partly because most software is developed in English first with the addition of accents an add-on, which makes typing accents cumbersome and thus the path of least resistance is to give up, especially when writing casually.
As of right now I'm on a mac and I feel very comfortable with the way they've designed input for "roman accented" letters (using the option key, or for some using long presses) but it's a whole other thing once I see a Windows computer.
I'll keep it in mind if I end up making myself a desktop PC in the future. But I guess the hardest part about any good alternative design isn't so much the design itself but its adoption and how often you're interacting with it to rewire your brain.
You can use QWERTY with accents very easily with "International keyboard with dead keys"[1]. You can configure OS to switch keyboard with Alt+Shift to have the regular QWERTY and the International-QWERTY when you need it.
[1] https://web.cortland.edu/ponterior/keyboard/#:~:text=The%20U....
Portuguese is full of those, and it's a major source of resistance on changing the language in Brazil. (Although Brazilian resistance may look like plain acceptance from French standards.)
vers, verre, vert.
mer, mère, maire.
In writing you can usually do away with all the accents (many of them are grammatical or the strictly correct spelling but without changing the pronunciation and with little change of the 'look' of the word) without problems.
la porte vs. il a porté
etc.
there are definitely words in French, where the accent makes a difference in pronunciation. there are also some cases where there are meaning differences, even when the words are pronounced the same e.g. du vs. dû.
Now it's usually not a problem, as ambiguity in general is rarely a problem in language due to context.
I guess I proved your point to some extent: I care less about accent errors than other mistakes, and just consider it a typo. But reading a completely unaccented text is hard for me, and I text, e-mail, and communicate online a lot.
In my experience, people are not foregoing them on purpose, except on capital letters, which is an heritage of AZERTY keyboards + windows (hopefully AFNOR keyboards catches on). Capital accented letters is the example to cite if you want an example of computer technology changing our habits: my friend Etienne (Étienne?) insists there is no accent on hist first name, but it makes no sense to me.
The point was simply that accents in French can change pronunciation, or at least change the meaning even if the pronunciation remains the same.
il est content (= he's happy)
ils content (= they are telling a story)
... so one less accent doesn't hurt that much :)
The only “important” accented letter is “é”. In most cases “è” is completely redundant as it follows the rule that if the next vowel is a silent “e” then the current “e” takes the \ε\ sound. “Ê” makes the same sound but is there for historical reasons. We can determine if we need an open “e” sound by applying like 2 rules (the aforementioned one and e followed by two consonants is always open) and by memorising some of the multigraphs which are part of the phonetics as it is.
Removing “é” makes it harder to determine pronunciation and makes it easier to confuse tenses, eg “il a mange”, if you’re reading you might “a” and misunderstand the tense (he ate vs he eats). There aren’t any consistent rules for the use of “é” apart from the start of a word.
Personally speaking, I rely on “é” a lot more than I do on “è” and I’ve been tripped up by a missing ’ on “e” many times unlike the other one.
In “typewriter” English which is dominant because of, first, typewriters and then ASCII and then keyboards and then familiarity (as unicode and mobile keyboard usually support additional characters easily), that's true of almost all punctuation. In typeset English (which Unicode in principle supports), it's true of somewhat less punctuation.
Perhaps the software culture has also changed. When people were mostly typing "seriously" in Word or email all the correct typography was implemented. For example Word selects the correct quotation marks automatically based on locale.
Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, etc. do not care. Just ship fast.
Indeed tech is not made in a local-friendly way normally - for example, losing those symbols is a direct consequence of the fact that they are usually buried with other rarely used symbols. But for cases like punctuation, I don't really mind it. It might just be me but I've never cared about " vs » and I'm happy to have an international standard to make things easier. diacritics are more important (n vs ñ, o vs ó) but those are usually far better covered by autocomplete, so no complains there.
Perhaps it's a generational thing, but so far I've worked for two multinationals including a bank and I can't think of a single person that bothered to do so, except for official communications that are usually edited by someone whose very job is to do that.
Neither did my teachers at University, and frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the official rules are changed in the next couple of decades.
> “You don't seem to be anything special,” said Korkala almost sadly, “but there's no help to it.”
Another thing to note is that if the quotation spans multiple paragraphs, you repeat the opening quote at the start of each paragraph (but not the closing one - it only appears at the end of the last paragraph).
I've seen them used also as kind of a replacement for parentheses. Sometimes a phrase benefits from —but doesn't strictly require— an extra clarification.
Are people switching voluntarily or because it is the new default?
Interestingly, the computer keyboards are stuck with the old layouts. You can't buy a Russian keyboard with the right quotation marks. I am using a custom layout by Ilya Birman [1] that makes a nice remapping with «» available quickly.
Eg:
Féar - grass. Fear - man. Cás - case. Cas - turn. Lóndubh - (nonsense) black lunch. Londubh - blackbird.
Personally, I've always hated the ISO enter key and QWERTZ (although that's a bit of a tangent). I also think having a different keyboard for every European language is a losing strategy, especially when people might be required to type in two languages. If you know about it, for some languages the macOS approach works really well.
iOS is also passable; a long press brings up options (e.g. on s -> ß/ś/š). It's a bit more tedious.
As far as I can tell there's nothing like it in Windows - if you don't know how to input a special character, you have to open Character Map - which bugs me as someone living in continental Europe but using a US keyboard.
Another issue is that you are supposed to type a non-braking space inside, which is a hassle, and often not present on keyboards either. Word processors usually take care of both these issues, replacing " with the appropriate (opening or closing) guillemet + space.
Spaces are also used in Switzerland, but narrow (&nnbsp; instead of ).
"…" is genarally ok for casual writing and messaging, while „…“ is still standard for print.
I would have sworn that I had seen the title marks used for both as well, but it has been 10 years or so since I have had any real exposure.
Those aren't rare in French-speaking communities (although " is dominant because of how bad the AZERTY layout is), and they're mandatory in press.
Only now I'm realising I've in fact been taught to use guillemets and it took me only two and a half decades!
In hindsight, my primary school teacher was already about to retire when I was learning to write, so it's likely that she had been brought up in a much earlier school of style than one that is being taught now. Considering that Turkish has been shedding its Francophone writing style [0][1] for a while now, I consider it an echo of a bygone era. That said, Turkish still considers French its 'official' interface to Indo-European words, and there exists a structure that can convert any French word into a valid Turkish one. A simple example: London in Turkish is Londra — it sounds exactly the same as Londres spoken by a French speaker. A more recent example is Pope Francis, whose Turkish name is Papa Fransua, which sounds exactly the same as Papa François as it would be in French. Basically, the 'method' involves saying what you want in French and encoding it with Turkish ortography, and then it's a valid Turkish word. [2]
[0] Another one of these Francophone stylings is the tradition to capitalise the surnames, like Amelie POULAIN, or Bora ALTUNİZADE, which has been considered outdated for a decade or two.
[1] Writing style is moving towards Britain, but not words — 11% of modern Turkish vocabulary is still directly from French, second only to ancient Turkish from 11th century.
[2] Famously, Turkish alphabet contains the letter J solely to be able to encode French words with the correct sound — the J sound does not otherwise appear in any Turkish word, only in words derived from French. Outside of French words, Turkish retains the original Latin J sound that is also used in German, which is a Y sound, so it gets encoded as Y in ortography, removing the need for letter J. For example, Joseph in Turkish becomes Yusuf, Johannes becomes Yuhanna.
I was JUST putting together a feature that has a bit of quoted text and I was wondering if I needed to put in a localization request to my company's localization group. Now I know!.
We also use »« as second-level quotes.