French. The
The grave accent can be found above an “a”, an “e”, or a “u” (à/è/ù). It does a few different things. Firstly, it's used above an “a” or “u” to distinguish words which have the same pronunciation but different meanings: a vs à: a is the third-person singular form of avoir (“to have”)
Â, â (a-circumflex) is a letter of the Inari Sami, Skolt Sami, Romanian, and Vietnamese alphabets. This letter also appears in French, Friulian, Frisian, Portuguese, Turkish, Walloon, and Welsh languages as a variant of the letter "a".
The 5 accents in French writing are:
l'accent aigu (acute accent) – é l'accent grave (grave accent) – à, è, ù la cédille (cedilla) – ç l'accent circonflexe (circumflex) – â, ê, î, ô, û
On the letter e, the grave accent is a pronunciation marker, indicating that the pronunciation is [ɛ]. In French, this sound is most commonly found in closed syllables. When spelling out loud, è is called e accent grave.
In French, E is the only letter that can be modified with l'accent aigu, the acute accent. With the accent, it may be called either e accent aigu or simply é, pronounced [e] (more or less like "ay"). As indicated by the latter, the acute accent changes the vowel's pronunciation to [e]. Par exemple… é sound.
À, à (a-grave) is a letter of the Catalan, Emilian-Romagnol, French, Galician, Italian, Maltese, Occitan, Portuguese, Sardinian, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, and Welsh languages consisting of the letter A of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and a grave accent. À is also used in Pinyin transliteration.
A cedilla is a symbol that is written under the letter 'c' in French, Portuguese, and some other languages to show that you pronounce it like a letter 's' rather than like a letter 'k'. It is written ç.
Cedilla: ç
The little hook ¸ added under the letter c in French is a diacritical mark known as a cedilla, une cédille. The letter c with the hook ç is called c cédille. The sole purpose of the cedilla is to change a hard c, pronounced [k], to a soft c, pronounced [s].
CEFR levels. “A” Levels (Basic User) A1 (Beginner) A2 (Elementary)
È, or è is a letter of the Latin script, formed with an addition of a grave accent onto the letter E. In English, è is sometimes used in the past tense or past participle forms of verbs in poetic texts to indicate that the final syllable should be pronounced separately.
The Letter Ä With Two Dots Is an Umlaut
The same dots also appear over other letters in yet more languages, notably Spanish, where the dots (known in Spanish as the “diaresis” mark) only occur above the letter ü.
Ā, lowercase ā, is a grapheme, a Latin A with a macron, used in several orthographies. Ā is used to denote a long A.
Generally speaking, à means "to," "at," or "in," while de means "of" or "from." Both prepositions have numerous uses and to understand each better, it is best to compare them. Learn more about the preposition de.
Á, á (a-acute) is a letter of the Chinese (Pinyin), Blackfoot, Czech, Dutch, Faroese, Filipino, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Lakota, Navajo, Occitan, Portuguese, Sámi, Slovak, Spanish, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Western Apache languages as a variant of the letter a.
Ç always sounds like [“sss”] !
So it's a way to have a “c” letter that sounds like “sss” even in front of a / o / u. For instance: A : Ça = [sah] = “this” ; Français = [fransay] = French!
In many languages, ⟨ç⟩ represents the "soft" sound /s/ where a ⟨c⟩ would normally represent the "hard" sound /k/. These include: Catalan. Known as ce trencada ('broken C') in this language, where it can be used before ⟨a⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩ or at the end of a word.
Ç or ç (C-cedilla) is a Latin script letter, used in the Albanian, Azerbaijani, Manx, Tatar, Turkish, Turkmen, Kurdish, Zazaki, and Romance alphabets. Romance languages that use this letter include Catalan, French, Friulian, Ligurian, Occitan, and Portuguese as a variant of the letter C with a cedilla.
The Southwestern accent, which derived from the Occitan dialect spoken in the area around Toulouse, is pretty popular in France and was named the sexiest regional accent. It is often described as “singing”. Although it can seem relatively similar to a Southern accent, it is closer to Spanish or Catalan.
A strong Québécois accent is one of the more difficult French accents to understand. That's partly because many vowels and syllables are condensed or dropped. Whereas a French person will say en tout cas for “in any case,” a Québécois will say en't'ca.
The Parisian accent is often considered "standard" French and is what you may hear the most often on television. This accent is influenced by the city: quick-paced, it is as if speakers are almost swallowing some of the sounds.
Grave accent (è)
This left-leaning mark is used in French to indicate that e is pronounced as eh or is used over an a or u to distinguish between words with otherwise identical spelling and pronunciation.
In French, the vowel so marked has a certain grave and long sound quality. The circumflex accent adds a certain musicality to a word; some would argue it confers poetry to words. More practically, it can also change the meaning of a word.
Accent Marks in Spanish
Accents are frequently used with some words such as qué, meaning "what," and cuál, meaning "which," when they are used in questions. Spanish accents can only be written over the five vowels, a, e, i, o, u, and the accent is written from lower left to upper right: á, é, í, ó, ú.