Upside-down question and exclamation marks

Upside-down punctuation is especially critical in Spanish since the syntax of the language means that both statements and questions or exclamations could have the same wording.

In sentences that are both declarative and interrogative, the clause that asks a question is isolated with the starting-symbol upside-down question mark, for example: "Si no puedes ir con ellos, ¿quieres ir con nosotros?"

Upside-down marks, simple in the era of hand typesetting, were originally recommended by the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy), in the second edition of the Ortografía de la lengua castellana (Orthography of the Castilian language) in 1754[3] recommending it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish—e.g.

[citation needed] Outside of the Spanish-speaking world, John Wilkins proposed using the upside-down exclamation mark "¡" as a symbol at the end of a sentence to denote irony in 1668.

He was one of many, including Desiderius Erasmus, who felt there was a need for such a punctuation mark, but Wilkins' proposal, like the other attempts, failed to take hold.

[8] Certain Catalan-language authorities, such as Joan Solà i Cortassa, insist that both the opening and closing question marks be used for clarity.

[9] Some Spanish-language writers, among them Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), refuse to use the upside-down question mark.

"), or vice versa, for statements that are questions but also have a clear sense of exclamation or surprise such as: ¡Y tú quién te crees?

¡ and ¿ are in the "Latin-1 Supplement" Unicode block, which is inherited from ISO-8859-1: ¿ and ¡ are available in all keyboard layouts designed for Spanish-speaking countries.