Why English doesn't use accents
78 comments
·July 6, 2025amelius
jcranmer
That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.
There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.
[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.
wredcoll
I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does.
Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!
germandiago
As a spanish I could say the most challenging part of english is the lack of consistency between how you write something and how you pronounce.
Spanish is totally systematic in this sense and once you can read it, you can pronounce it.
English is a bit messy regarding to this, for whatever reasons.
degun
The explanation you gave is already contained in the cited Wikipedia article. I think this "ghoti" example is more of a tongue-in-cheek mocking of pronunciation inconsistencies. If you want a jarring example, consider laughter and slaughter. I know, i know, they have different origins, but still, it confuses foreigners like me while learning the language.
mousethatroared
But English orthography isn't meant to serve foreigners.
Im ESL, I struggled with English spelling as much as the next latin speaker who's already learned to read and write in foreigner.
But now that I get the reason behind it, I love it. I consider English orthography worthy of UNESCO protection, even. In fact, I am annoyed at the regular spelling of my two latin languages that have left so much history behind.
papichulo2023
As a non native, it still bothers me how "toward" is pronounced, "toord", really?
antod
That's just one accent. Most accents pronounce that W (especially outside the US).
gatlin
come to texas and experience a whole universe of dipthongs (one of which remedies this)
Tagbert
‘W’ started out as a long ‘U’ so it’s not unreasonable
jojobas
It's not, unless you're a yankee. They're going to hear you're a foreigner anyway, might as well speak Queen's English.
knome
ghoti is a ridiculous example. it takes its components entirely out of context. 'gh' as 'f' only occurs at the end of a syllable, 'ti' as 'sh' only exists as part of '-tion' where the pronunciation slurred over time. Pretending it says anything about the nature of the English language outside of English being a complex merging of various other languages that has evolved with time is silly.
salomonk_mur
Read and read are the same exact fucking letters and are pronounced differently. You really don't need to go very far to find many examples.
English is fucked up. The only way to learn how to speak it properly is by memorization.
Other languages like Spanish or Korean keep a near-perfect one to one correspondence between written form and expected pronunciation.
efilife
I don't know how to write this in a more polite way. I keep seeing bootlickers that defend this absolute atrocity of a language and they always find ridiculous contradicting ways to say how English is actually not fucked up. It is. I maintain a list of words (since 2022) where I collect many inconsistencies in English like:
infinite, finite
sign, signal
wind, rewind
heave, heavy
And countless more like this. This language is beyond fucked and this is not possible to defend logically. This also causes many problems for people who learn english solely by speaking, they don't know the difference between "its" and "it's", "they/they're/their" and so on. In my native language these kinds of errors are impossible as how you pronounce letters doesn't change depending on the word they are in
eahm
French.. you people have no idea how Italy is.
I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.
The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.
Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.
mousethatroared
And it's great.
My HS Italian teacher's university thesis was on the different dialects within Naples and their various (ancient) Greek origins.
megablast
> mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.
Like what? You have to give us examples.
mikequinlan
Clearly the early scribes were looking forward to the 7-bit ASCII code and needed to reduce the number of characters that were represented.
bawolff
If you go early enough, my understanding is that people would write accents in ascii by doing:
e <backspace character> '
Which was called "overstriking".
kps
Yes, this was explicitly called out in the ASCII standard, and is the reason ASCII has ~ (in place of the proposed ‾) and ‘^’ (which replaced the ‘↑’ in the original 1963 version).
PyWoody
If you go back even further, you get the iota subscript [0]
mousethatroared
You're not wrong, except the technological reason. As I understand it, English lost a lot of characters when the movable type printing press was created.
porphyra
The Economist magazine uses a diæresis (two dots) in words like “coöperate” and “reëlect” to indicate that both vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as a diphthong. This is considered old-school and uncommon though.
asielen
That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.
As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.
The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.
Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...
SnooSux
Unless The Economist does it as well, you were probably thinking of The New Yorker.
https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2020/03/24/umlauts-diaereses-...
porphyra
Oops I think you are right. My parents subscribed to both and I must have mixed them up.
nlawalker
Learning the relationship between a diæresis and a diphthong and then seeing that the word diæresis contains a diphthong has rounded out my day nicely, thanks for that.
schoen
I enjoyed learning recently that the most common diacritics in Czech are the háček and the čárka. The word "háček" has a čárka followed by a háček, while the word "čárka" has a háček followed by by a čárka!
madcaptenor
A "calque" is a word that's been brought from one language into another by translating the individual parts. A "loanword" is a word that's been brought over by just taking the word with little modification.
For example, "calque" is a loanword, while "loanword" (from German "Lehnwort") is a calque.
duskwuff
Similarly, a grave accent is sometimes used in poetry to indicate that a single vowel is voiced - e.g. in "cursèd" to indicate that the word should be pronounced as two syllables "curse-ed", rather than a single syllable "curst".
Loanwords often retain their accents as well: cliché, façade, doppelgänger, jalapeño.
madcaptenor
But it's habanero, not habañero - people mistakenly put the ñ by analogy with jalapeño.
nicoburns
That seems like a quirk of the magazine for thsie pstticular words, but its more common for some others like "naïve" and "Zoë", although that's gone out of fashion somewhat since computers took over (and I believe both of those are loan words in english)
ww520
Used to just be a dash, like re-elect. Cooperate was co-operate. People got tired of writing dashes and they got shortened.
racingmars
I don't remember ever seeing that in The Economist.
I think you're thinking of New Yorker magazine, perhaps?
OJFord
It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.
Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.
Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.
GianFabien
On the internet the most marked issue is the difference between British English spellings (England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and the USA. It is frustrating that on most spell checked text boxes words like: harbour, labour, actualise, etc shown as misspelt.
I find it most irksome that the Australian Labor Party has chosen the USA spelling in spite of being part of the Commonwealth.
danbolt
After enough programming over the years, I feel like my mind has separated the concept of a colour (which I learned as a child) and `Color` data.
OJFord
Did you mean misspelled
JumpCrisscross
> though its use may mark the author as among the agèd
Thirtysomething here. I use diaeresis (a/k/a diæresis) over e.g. coöperate. It’s more concise than a hyphen. And it makes more sense than cooperate, given cooper is a word.
every
Fascinating site...
Dwedit
Diacritics aren't unambiguous, there are different conventions for using them. What sound does "ā" make? It depends.
Affric
If what it depends on is the language then thats trivial.
dijit
Why is it trivial?
The ä and a sounds in Swedish and Finnish are swapped; and they're direct neighbours (with compulsory education for Swedish in Finland, no less).
forinti
But within each language it is well defined.
Between languages, even the letters have different uses. Diacritics can be used to signal a different sound or the tonicity of the word (at least in the languages I know those are the two uses).
I don't understand what this thread is all about. English doesn't need accents because there's no universal meaning attached to each one? That doesn't make sense.
em-bee
not just neighbors by country. a not insignificant proportion of finns speak swedish natively
TacticalCoder
Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways?
For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french you pronounced the 't', like in "table" (yup, it means a table btw).
Speaking of which, the 'e' in "le chat" isn't pronounced the same as the mostly (but not entirely) silent 'e' in "table".
No diacritics on these 'e' here and yet they've got different pronunciations.
Don't come and say: "but that's only with silent letters". Definitely not. "elle" (she) and "le" (the)... Different pronunciation for these three e's.
I've got better: "les fils" (the sons) vs "les fils" (the cables). Exact same spelling. But in one you pronounce the 's', in the other you don't.
Wait, even better: "le fils" (the son) vs "les fils" (the sons). Same pronunciation for "fils", no plural or singular: just one word with a 's' at the end.
Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.
And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall so the whole point is kinda moot: the digital natives can't use diacritics properly in french. Heck, many can't even (and don't want to) speak proper french. The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.
Source: I'm a native french speaker.
shiroiuma
>Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages
Some languages really are a lot better than English as far as mapping between spellings and pronunciations. French just isn't one of them; as you pointed out, it's possibly even worse.
I point to German as the superior European language in this regard. I learned some in high school. I can't speak conversationally any more, but I know the pronunciation rules, so if I can read it, I can say it and pronounce it well enough for a German speaker to understand me, even though I don't understand it myself.
That said, German is a nightmare compared to English because of the grammatical complexity (cases etc.), but for pronunciation in relation to spelling, it's excellent. The written form really does reflect the spoken form accurately.
jraph
Spanish seems quite decent in both of these aspects.
jraph
> it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.
Pronunciation-wise, I doubt it. All your examples have English counterparts.
Consider eleven (the vowel sounds for the same letter), psychology (silent p), wind / rewind, many irregular verbs (like read, read, read), Wednesday and business (many letters are just not/weirdly pronounced), history and litterature (one fewer syllable than expected), the complex rules to pronounce the ed + exceptions... You basically have to know how an English word is pronounced to pronounce it correctly. Guessing works but only so far, and I believe less than for French (and I'm a French speaker too).
I have a close friend from the US who likes to make fun of the French language, but when I cite English, he says oh yeah, but for English we already know that! :-)
Anyway, English and French are both quite bad at this, and you are right, that's nothing to be proud about. It's just a reality we have to deal with.
> The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.
Simpler is not dumber and I absolutely don't think the language is becoming dumber. The last reform (1990) brings more regularity and this is most welcome, freeing us time for things that actually matter, making the language more accessible to foreigners as well as people with conditions like dyslexia or dysorthography and less a status tool. I welcome the French language becoming more welcoming.
Or please strongly back your dumber and dumber statement. Because usually that's just baseless, tired rambling from clueless conservative people saying such things. A French speciality (a national sport even, championed by the Figaro?).
> And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall
That too. Maybe you should fix your English before lamenting on the writing skills of people, because you are making a lot of basic language mistakes in this very comment in which you are doing this. That's harsh and not nice, but that's what you are seemingly doing to others and I want to take the opportunity to make you feel what it may feel like. Actually, you probably cannot even begin to imagine how you may sound like to people for whom writing is a struggle. Such people often feel ashamed because of people like you. Let's just be forgiving, tolerant, more empathetic and stop using language skills as status and start focusing on the content.
I have a close acquaintance who expresses themself perfectly, only writing without mistakes is hard for them. They even have an official disability recognition for their strong dyslexia (so they can have a related tool on their workstation). Let's just cut people some slack on their writing skills (which are in the vast majority not related to laziness - or maybe you are suggesting people are dumber and dumber?) and the world will be a better place.
See also [1] for a nuanced discussion on "Writing skills are lower and lower". It turns out it's partly due to more people going to school and not only the elite, which is a good thing, including children whose first language is not French and whose life in general may likely be a bit more complicated than the one of a random privileged French child (like I was).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8SJ6v2A0qU&t=120 (in French)
jandrewrogers
FWIW, both “history” and “literature” have the number syllables you would expect in my dialect of English (Western American), at least among people I know. But I know exactly what you are talking about! Many regional dialects drop the “o” in history and the first “e” in literature.
On the other hand, we do violence to the pronunciation of “comfortable”. I’ve lived in so many parts of the English speaking world that I can partially code switch pronunciation for some dialects. Kind of weird but not that bad.
andy99
I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and even French, heavily depend on tone for understanding so are tougher for non-native speakers to communicate in. Butchered English can still be generally understood, thus it's position as lingua franca.
ayende
French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun intended)
jonathanlb
Former linguistics major here. Interestingly, 'lingua franca' originally referred to a specific pidgin trade language spoken in the Mediterranean. The 'franca' part referred to the Franks, who were originally a Germanic tribe that established kingdoms in what is now France and much of western Europe. By the late Byzantine period, 'Franks' had become a blanket term for all Western Europeans. What happened to both 'Franks' and eventually to 'lingua franca' is an example of semantic broadening.
acheron
Yes, the “Franks” in “lingua franca” were mostly Italians.
boredatoms
English is currently popular because money is always popular
dijit
This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct.
If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.
The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.
Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".
Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.
yongjik
> The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules ...
Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language.
(Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no natural human languages in the world that are dictated by formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact descriptions devised to explain the language that is already there.)
lenzm
> the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that
Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because it's means making more money - in technology, finance, tourism, ...
mk_stjames
Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases.
I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
teleforce
Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most probably you won't understand most of the same sentences.
gwervc
Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.
FridayoLeary
Harsh but that rings true. In it's defense i'll point out that English is exponentially more useful in the modern world and even French has started borrowing nouns from English. Also English has more words then any other language which in my mind makes it the best. (to clarify i know a little of other languages and i understand that there are concepts which English is not even equipped to express properly but i stand by what i write)
I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.
OneMorePerson
Is it the case that it encodes no information, or is it the case that the information is somehow..."optional"? I know I selectively ignore unintentionally snarky or sarcastic tones from non native English speakers. Even the simple example of turning "ok" into "oook" can be used to imply someone is being unreasonable.
null
catlikesshrimp
Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image.
Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance.
I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way
OneMorePerson
Given the meaning of "accent" given in the article Chinese seems like a very accented language (saying that as a Mandarin speaker). Aren't Chinese tones the very definition of an accented language? (as defined by the article, accent is a broad term)
teleforce
Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1].
Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.
Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.
As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.
[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488
[2] Hangul:
dmurray
> Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing.
Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones). Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin and their local dialect well.
Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".
English doesn't use accents because the speakers don't give a __ about the correspondence between the written form and the pronunciation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti