The grave accent (◌̀) (/ɡreɪv/ GRAYV[1][2] or /ɡrɑːv/ GRAHV[1][2]) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English.
Italian has word pairs where one has an accent marked and the other not, with different pronunciation and meaning—such as pero ('pear tree') and però ('but'), and papa ('pope') and papà ('dad'); the latter example is also valid for Catalan.
In Bulgarian, the grave accent sometimes appears on the vowels а, о, у, е, и, and ъ to mark stress.
It most commonly appears in books for children or foreigners, and dictionaries—or to distinguish between near-homophones: па̀ра (pàra 'steam, vapour') and пара̀ (parà, 'cent, penny, money'), въ̀лна (vằlna 'wool') and вълна̀ (vǎlnà 'wave').
[citation needed] In Macedonian, the stress mark is orthographically required to distinguish homographs (see § Disambiguation) and is put mostly on the vowels е and и.
[citation needed] In modern Church Slavonic, there are three stress marks (acute, grave, and circumflex), which formerly represented different types of pitch accent.
Similarly, the colloquial contraction of "para o" (for the, masculine) may be spelled prò [pɾu] (unstressed) as opposed to pró (pro, in favor of), which is stressed: ['pɾɔ].
In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese, and Mandarin Chinese (when it is written in Hanyu Pinyin or Zhuyin Fuhao), the grave accent indicates a falling tone.
In African languages and in International Phonetic Alphabet, the grave accent often indicates a low tone: Nobiin jàkkàr ('fishhook'), Yoruba àgbọ̀n ('chin'), Hausa màcè ('woman').
[citation needed] In Emilian, a grave accent placed over e or o denotes both length and openness; è and ò represent [ɛː] and [ɔː].
In Philippine languages, the grave accent (paiwà) is used to represent a glottal stop in the last vowel of the word with the stress occurring in the first or middle syllable such as in Tagalog batà [ˈbataʔ] ('child').
The grave accent, though rare in English words, sometimes appears in poetry and song lyrics to indicate that a usually silent vowel is pronounced to fit the rhythm or meter.
A grave accent can also occur in a foreign (usually French) term which has not been anglicised: for example, vis-à-vis, pièce de résistance or crème brûlée.
For example, to make à, the user can tap and hold a and then tap or slide to à. Mac versions of OS X Mountain Lion (10.8) or newer share similar functionality to iOS; by pressing and holding a vowel key to open an accent menu, the user may click on the grave accented character or type the corresponding number key displayed.