Quotation mark
Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.
History
The single quotation mark is traced to Ancient Greek practice, adopted and adapted by monastic copyists. Isidore of Seville, in his seventh century encyclopedia, Etymologiae, described their use of the Greek diplé, a symbol like a right angle bracket:The double quotation mark derives from a marginal notation used in fifteenth-century manuscript annotations to indicate a passage of particular importance ; the notation was placed in the outside margin of the page and was repeated alongside each line of the passage. In his edition of the works of Aristotle, which appeared in 1483 or 1484, the Milanese Renaissance humanist Francesco Filelfo marked literal and appropriate quotes with oblique double dashes on the left margin of each line. Until then, literal quotations had been highlighted or not at the author's discretion. were marked on the edge. After the publication of Filelfo's edition, the quotation marks for literal quotations prevailed. During the seventeenth century this treatment became specific to quoted material, and it grew common, especially in Britain, to print quotation marks at the beginning and end of the quotation as well as in the margin; the French usage is a remnant of this. In most other languages, including English, the marginal marks dropped out of use in the last years of the eighteenth century. The usage of a pair of marks, opening and closing, at the level of lower case letters was generalized.
By the nineteenth century, the design and usage began to be specific to each region. In Western Europe the custom became to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity of each mark aimed outward. In Britain those marks were elevated to the same height as the top of capital letters:.
In France, by the end of the nineteenth century, the marks were modified to an angular shape. Some authors claim that the reason for this was a practical one, in order to get a character that was clearly distinguishable from apostrophes, commas, and parentheses. Also, in other scripts, the angular quotation marks are distinguishable from other punctuation characters: the Greek breathing marks, the Armenian emphasis and apostrophe, the Arabic comma, the decimal separator, the thousands separator, etc. Other authors claim that the reason for this was an aesthetic one: the elevated quotation marks created extra white space before and after the word, below the quotation marks. This was considered aesthetically unpleasing, while the in-line quotation marks helped to maintain the typographical color, since the quotation marks had the same height and were aligned with the lower case letters. Nevertheless, while other languages do not insert spaces between the quotation marks and the word quoted, the French usage does insert them, even if they are narrow spaces.
The curved quotation marks usage,, was exported to some non-Latin scripts, notably where there was some English influence, for instance in Native American scripts and Indic scripts. On the other hand, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Ethiopic adopted the French "angular" quotation marks,. The Far East angle bracket quotation marks,, are also a development of the in-line angular quotation marks.
In Central Europe, the practice was to use the quotation mark pairs with the convexity aimed inward. The German tradition preferred the curved quotation marks, the first one at the level of the commas, the second one at the level of the apostrophes:. Alternatively, these marks could be angular and in-line with lower case letters, but still pointing inward:. Some neighboring regions adopted the German curved marks tradition with lower–upper alignment, while some, e.g. Poland, adopted a variant with the convexity of the closing mark aimed rightward like the opening one,.
Sweden chose a convention where the convexity of both marks was aimed to the right but lined up both at the top level:.
In Eastern Europe, there was hesitation between the French tradition and the German tradition. The French tradition prevailed in Eastern Europe, whereas the German tradition, or its modified version with the convexity of the closing mark aimed rightward, has become dominant in Southeastern Europe, e.g. in the Balkan countries. In Romania the: version is officially recognized by the Romanian Academy.
In some languages using the angular quotation marks, the usage of the single guillemet,, became obsolete, being replaced by double curved ones:, though the single ones still survive, for instance, in Switzerland. In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, the curved quotation marks,, are used as a secondary level or in handwriting, while the angular marks,, are used as the primary level on printed text.
In English
In English writing, quotation marks are placed in pairs around a word or phrase to indicate:- Quotation or direct speech:
- Mention in another work of the title of a short or subsidiary work, such as a chapter or an episode:.
- Scare quotes, used to mean "so-called" or to express sarcasm:.
British publishing is regarded as more flexible about whether double or single quotation marks should be used. A tendency to use single quotation marks in British writing is thought to have arisen after the mid-19th century invention of steam-powered presses and the consequent rise of London and New York as distinct, industrialized publishing centers whose publishing houses adhered to separate norms. The King's English in 1908 noted that the prevailing British practice was to use double marks for most purposes, and single ones for quotations within quotations. Different media now follow different conventions in the United Kingdom.
Different varieties and styles of English have different conventions regarding whether terminal punctuation should be written inside or outside the quotation marks. North American printing usually puts full stops and commas inside the closing quotation mark, whether it is part of the original quoted material or not. Styles elsewhere vary widely and have different rationales for placing it inside or outside, often a matter of house style.
Typographic forms
Regarding their appearance, two shape classifications of quotation marks are used in English-language texts:- and are known as neutral, vertical, straight, typewriter, dumb, or ASCII quotation marks. The left and right marks are identical. These are the symbols found on typical QWERTY keyboards, although they are sometimes automatically converted to the other type by software.
- and are known as typographic, curly, curved, book, or smart quotation marks. The beginning marks look like commas raised to the ascender line and rotated 180 degrees. The ending marks look like commas raised to the ascender line. Curved quotation marks are used mainly in manuscript, printing, and typesetting. Type cases generally have the curved quotation mark metal types for the respective language, and may lack the vertical quotation mark metal types. Because most computer keyboards lack keys to enter typographic quotation marks directly, much that is written using word-processing programs has vertical quotation marks. The "smart quotes" feature in some computer software can convert vertical quotation marks to curly ones, although sometimes inappropriately.
Summary table
Other languages have similar conventions to English, but use different symbols or different placement.Specific language features
Bulgarian
Contemporary Bulgarian employs the em dash or the quotation dash followed by a space character at the beginning of each direct-speech segment by a different character in order to mark direct speech in prose and in most journalistic question and answer interviews; in such cases, the use of standard quotation marks is left for in-text citations or to mark the names of institutions, companies, and sometimes also brand or model names.Air quotes are also widely used in face-to-face communication in contemporary Bulgarian but usually resemble
"... " unlike written Bulgarian quotation marks.Dutch
The standard form in the preceding table is taught in schools and used in handwriting. Most large newspapers have kept these low-high quotation marks, and ; otherwise, the alternative form with single or double English-style quotes is now often the only form seen in printed matter. Neutral quotation marks, and, are used widely, especially in texts typed on computers and on websites.Although not generally common in the Netherlands any more, double angle quotation marks are still sometimes used in Belgium. Examples include the Flemish HUMO magazine and the Metro newspaper in Brussels.
German
The symbol used as the left quote in English is used as the right quote in Germany and Austria and a "low double comma" is used for the left quote. Its single quote form looks like a comma.| Samples | Unicode | HTML | Description | Wrong Symbols |
| German single quotes | ||||
| German double quotes | " – neutral double quotes |
Some fonts, e.g. Verdana, were not designed with the flexibility to use an English left quote as a German right quote. Such fonts are therefore typographically incompatible with this German usage.
Double quotes are standard for denoting speech in German.
This style of quoting is also used in Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Estonian, Georgian, Icelandic, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene and in Ukrainian.
Sometimes, especially in novels, guillemets are used in Germany and Austria :
In Switzerland, the [|French-style angle quotation mark sets] are also used for German printed text: «A ‹B›?»