Guillemet

Guillemets (Template:Pron-en, or /ɡiːəˈmeɪ/ after French [ɡij(ə)mɛ]), also called angle quotes, are line segments, pointed as if arrows (« or »), sometimes forming a complementary set of punctuation marks used as a form of quotation mark. The symbol at either end – double « and » or single ‹ and › – is a guillemet. They are used in a number of languages to indicate speech. They are also used as symbols for rewind and fast forward.

Etymology

The word is a diminutive of the French name Guillaume (whose equivalent in English is William), after the French printer and punchcutter Guillaume le Bé (1525–1598). Some languages derive their word for guillemets analogously; for example, the Irish term is Liamóg, from Liam 'William' and a diminutive suffix.

Uses

Main article: Quotation mark, non-English usage

The uses are good.

Used pointing outwards («like this») to indicate speech in these languages and regions:

• Albanian
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Belarusian
• Breton
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Estonian
• Franco-Provençal
• French (separated by non-breaking spaces « like this », except in Switzerland)
• Galician
• Greek
• Italian
• North Korean (in South Korea " is used)
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Polish usually to indicate a quote inside a quote (nowadays, though incorrectly, more often used pointing inwards)
• Portuguese (European; now largely replaced by quotation marks)
• Romanian, only to indicate a quotation within a quotation
• Russian, and some languages of the former Soviet Union using Cyrillic script
• Spanish (although their use is uncommon outside Spain)
• Swiss languages
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Used pointing inwards (»like this«) to indicate speech in these languages:

• Croatian
• Czech (marked usage, „...“ prevails)
• Danish („...“ is also used)
• German (Except in Switzerland. „...“ is also used)
• Hungarian (only as a secondary quote, inside a section already marked by the usual quotes)
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Slovene

Used pointing right (»like this») to indicate speech in these languages:

• Finnish
• Swedish

Direction

A guillemet is sometimes used to indicate direction, for example:

• fast forward button on a media player, or fast rewind indicated by the complementary guillemet
• a chevron on road signage to show road direction, or multiple chevrons pointing in the same direction for emphasis
• as an alternative to an ellipsis in a document, for example to indicate additional content. The guillemet is balanced in the spine height of the line for most fonts, so it is more visible than an ellipsis.

Guillemets in computing

Programming Languages

The Perl 6 programming language uses « » and < > to combine quoting and subscripting. %table<name> has the same meaning as %table{'name'}, and %table«name» has the same meaning as %table{"name"}.

In the RPL programming language, guillemets are used to demarcate the beginning and end of a program block.

Typing "«" and "»" on computers

Windows users can create the guillemet by typing "«" by holding Alt + 0171 and "»" by holding Alt + 0187. The characters are standard on French Canadian keyboards and some others.

Macintosh users can type "«" as Option-Backslash and "»" as Option-Shift-Backslash. (This applies to all English-language keyboard layouts supplied with the operating system, e.g. "Australian", "British", "Canadian", "U.S." and "U.S. Extended". Other language layouts may differ.)

For GNU/Linux users, creation of the guillemet depends on a number of factors including the keyboard layout that is in effect, and on the usage of the X Window System. For example, with US International Keyboard layout selected a user would type Alt Gr + [ for "«" and Alt Gr + "]" for "»". On some configurations they can be written by typing "«" as Alt Gr + z and "»" as Alt Gr + x. With the compose key, press Compose + < + < and Compose + > + >.

Guillemets are often produced with double inequality characters (<< or >>) or double chevrons (〈〈 or 〉〉) particularly on computers with operating systems or keyboards that do not have support for the actual characters.

Terminology

In Unicode, the « character is called "left-pointing double angle quotation mark", and exists at code point U+00AB (HTML entity &laquo;), while the » character is named "right-pointing double angle quotation mark", and is located at code point U+00BB (HTML entity &raquo;). Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts.

UML

Guillemets are used in Unified Modeling Language to indicate a stereotype of a standard element.

Mail Merge

Microsoft Word uses guillemets when creating mail merges. Microsoft use these punctuation marks to denote a mail merge "field", such as «Title», «AddressBlock» or «GreetingLine». Then on the final print-out, the guillemet-marked tags are replaced by the corresponding data outlined for that field by the user.

Guillemet vs. guillemot

In Adobe Systems font software, their file format specifications, and in all fonts derived from these that contain the characters, the word is incorrectly spelled ‘guillemot’ (a malapropism: guillemot is actually a species of seabird) in the names of the two glyphs ‘guillemotleft’ and ‘guillemotright’. Adobe acknowledges the error.

Likewise, X11 (X Window System) mistakenly calls them ‘XK_guillemotleft’ and ‘XK_guillemotright’ in the file keysymdef.h.

See also

• Bracket
• Chevron
• Keyboard (computing)
• Quotation mark