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.

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. == 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: . In American writing, quotation marks are normally the double kind (the primary style). If quotation marks are used inside another pair of quotation marks, then single quotation marks are used. For example: If another set of quotation marks is nested inside single quotation marks, double quotation marks are used again, and they continue to alternate as necessary (though this is rarely done). 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 (but not colons, semicolons, exclamation or question marks) 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 doubled ones are more informally known as "66 and 99". ) The beginning marks look like commas raised to the ascender line and rotated 180 degrees (and thus known as inverted commas). The ending marks look like commas raised to the ascender line. Curved quotation marks are used mainly in manuscript, printing, and typesetting. Type cases (of any language) 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. The closing or right single quotation mark is identical in form to the apostrophe and similar to the prime symbol. The double quotation mark is identical to the ditto mark in English-language usage. It is also similar to—and often used to represent—the double prime symbol. These all serve different purposes and have distinct Unicode codepoints. File:Underwoodfive.jpg|A typewriter File:Upper case and lower case types.jpg|A type case containing sorts of movable type File:LenovoKeyboard.jpg|A wired computer keyboard for desktop use There is no space on the internal side of quote marks, with the exception of firet (≈ em) space between two quotation marks when there are no other characters between them (e.g. , „ and ’ ”). The above rules have not changed since at least the previous BN-76/7440-02 standard from 1976 and are probably much older. These rules on the use of guillemets conflict with the ones given by Polish dictionaries, including the Wielki Słownik Ortograficzny PWN recommended by the Polish Language Council. The PWN rules state: In Polish printed books and publications, this dictionary-recommended style for guillemets (also known as »German quotes«) is used almost exclusively. In addition to being standard for second level quotes, guillemet quotes are sometimes used as first level quotes in headings and titles, but almost never for ordinary text in paragraphs. Another style of quoting is to use an em-dash to open a quote; this is used almost exclusively for quoting dialogues rather than for single statements, and is virtually always the one used for that purpose in works of fiction. An en-dash is sometimes used in place of the em-dash, especially so in newspaper texts. in black : main sentence which contains the quotations; in green : 1st level quotation; in red : 2nd level quotation; in blue : 3rd level quotation; The usage of curved quotation marks (ex. ) is growing in Portugal, probably due to the omnipresence of the English language and to the corresponding difficulty (or even inability) to enter angular quotation marks on some machines (mobile phones, cash registers, calculators, etc.). In Brazil, angular quotation marks are rare, and curved quotation marks ( ) are almost always used. An example of this can be seen in the difference between a Portuguese keyboard (which has a key for and ) and a Brazilian keyboard. The Portuguese-speaking African countries tend to follow Portugal's conventions, not the Brazilian ones. Other usages of quotation marks ( for double, for single) are obsolete in Portuguese. . === Chinese, Japanese and Korean=== Corner brackets are well-suited for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean because they accommodate vertical and horizontal writing equally well. China, South Korea, and Japan all use corner brackets when writing vertically. Usage differs when writing horizontally: In Japan, corner brackets are used. In South Korea, corner brackets and English-style quotes are used. In North Korea, angle quotes are used. In mainland China, English-style quotes (full width “ ”) are official and prevalent; corner brackets are rare today. The Unicode code points used are the English quotes (rendered as fullwidth by the font), not the fullwidth forms. In Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, where traditional characters are used, corner brackets are prevalent, although English-style quotes are also used. In the Chinese language, double angle brackets are placed around titles of books, documents, movies, pieces of art or music, magazines, newspapers, laws, etc. When nested, single angle brackets are used inside double angle brackets. With some exceptions, this usage parallels the usage of italics in English: 「你看過《三國演義》嗎？」他問我。 "Have you read Romance of the Three Kingdoms?", he asked me. When corner brackets are being used for quotations, quote-within-quote segments are marked with white corner brackets. === Typewriters and early computers === On most keyboards, typographical quotation marks are absent. When typewriter keyboards were designed, curved quotation marks were not implemented. Instead, to limit the number of characters (and keys) required, straight quotation marks were invented as a compromise. At that time typesetting did use curved quotation marks. The ASCII character set, which has been used on a wide variety of computers since the 1960s, contains the straight versions only ( and ). All other forms of quotation marks, such as angled, lowered, inverted, were not provided by British or American typewriters. Many systems, such as the personal computers of the 1980s and early 1990s, actually drew these ASCII quotes like closing quotes (or primes) on-screen and in printouts, so text would appear like this (approximately): These same systems often drew the backtick (the free standing character ) as an 'open quote' glyph (usually a mirror image so it still sloped in the direction of a grave accent). Using this character as the opening quote gave a typographic approximation of curved single quotes. Nothing similar was available for the double quote, so many people resorted to using two single quotes for double quotes, which would look approximately like the following: The typesetting application TeX uses this convention for input files. The following is an example of TeX input which yields proper curly quotation marks. The Unicode standard added codepoints for slanted or curved quotes ( and , described further below), shown here for comparison: The Unicode mapping for PostScript Standard Encoding preserves the typographic approximation convention by mapping its equivalent of ASCII grave and single-quote to the Unicode curly quotation mark characters. In languages that use the curved “...” quotation marks, they are available in: Neo In languages that use angular «...» quotation marks, they are available in: Macintosh Arabic keyboard; Armenian keyboard Canadian keyboard French BÉPO keyboard Greek keyboard Khmer keyboard Latvian ergonomic keyboard Pashto keyboard Persian keyboard Portuguese keyboard Syriac keyboard Uyghur keyboard In languages that use the corner bracket 「...」 quotation marks, they are available in: Japanese keyboard In languages that use the angle bracket 《...》 they are available in: Mongolian keyboard New Tai Lue keyboard In languages that use the curved „...“ quotation marks, they are available in: Bulgarian keyboard Georgian keyboard Macedonian keyboard In languages that use the curved „...” quotation marks, they are available in: Romanian Standard SR 13392:2004 keyboard Neo In languages that use the curved ”...” quotation marks, they are available in: none === Unicode code point table === In Unicode, 30 characters are marked Quotation Mark=Yes by character property. They all have general category "Punctuation", and a subcategory Open, Close, Initial, Final or Other ( Ps, Pe, Pi, Pf, Po ). Several other Unicode characters with quotation mark semantics lack the character property. Index of quotation-marks-related material at the EnglishGrammar website "Œuvrez les guillemets" , Pauline Morfouace (2002) – French quotation mark typography

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