As a mark of elision In many languages, especially European languages, the apostrophe is used to indicate the
elision of one or more sounds, as in English. • In
Albanian, the apostrophe is used to show that a vowel has been omitted from words, especially in different forms of verbs and in some forms of personal pronoun. For example, : them (from : them), (from ). It is used too in some of the forms of possessive pronouns, for example: (from ). • In
Afrikaans, as in Dutch, the apostrophe is used to show that letters have been omitted from words. The most common use is in the indefinite article , which is a contraction of
een meaning 'one' (the number). As the initial
e is omitted and cannot be capitalised, the second word in a sentence that begins with is capitalised instead. For example: , 'A tree is green'. In addition, the apostrophe is used for plurals and diminutives where the root ends with long
vowels, e.g. , , , , etc. • In
Catalan,
French,
Italian,
Ligurian, and
Occitan word sequences such as , (often shortened to
maître d, when used in English), , and the final vowel in the first word (
de 'of',
le 'the', etc.) is elided because the word that follows it starts with a vowel or a
mute h.
French elision similarly occurs with instead of ('that he'), instead of ('it is' / 'it's'), and so on. Catalan, French, Italian, and Occitan surnames sometimes contain apostrophes of elision, e.g. , . • French feminine singular
possessive adjectives do not undergo such elision anymore, but change to the masculine form instead: '
preceding ' becomes '''' ('my church'). •
Quebec's
Bill 101, which dictates the use of
French in the province, prohibits the use of apostrophes in proper names in which it would not be used in proper French (thus the international donut chain
Tim Hortons, originally spelled with the possessive apostrophe as Tim Horton's, was required to drop the apostrophe in Quebec to comply with Bill 101). • In
Danish, apostrophes are sometimes seen on
commercial materials. One might commonly see ('Take me with [you]') next to a stand with advertisement leaflets; that would be written in standard orthography. As in German, the apostrophe must not be used to indicate the possessive, except when there is already an
s,
x or
z present in the base form, as in ('the Book of Esajas'). • In
Dutch, as in Afrikaans, the apostrophe is used to indicate omitted characters. For example, the indefinite article can be shortened to , and the definite article shortened to . When this happens in the first word of a sentence, the
second word of the sentence is capitalised. In general, this way of using the apostrophe is considered non-standard, except as
genitivus temporalis in , , , (for , 'at morning, at afternoon, at evening, at night') and in some frozen place names such as ''
's-Hertogenbosch'' (
possessive, lit. "The
Duke's forest"),
s-Gravenhage (traditional name of
The Hague, lit. "The
Count's hedge"),
s-Gravenbrakel (
Braine-le-Comte, in Belgium),
s-Hertogenrade (
Herzogenrath, in Germany), etc. In addition, the apostrophe is used for plurals where the singulars end with long
vowels, e.g. , ; and for the genitive of proper names ending with these vowels, e.g. , . These are in fact elided vowels; use of the apostrophe prevents spellings like and ; however, most
diminutives do not use an apostrophe where the plural forms would; producing spellings such as and . • In
Esperanto, the limits the elision mark to the definite article (from ) and singular nominative nouns ( from , 'heart'). This is mostly confined to poetry and songs. Idiomatic phrases such as (from , 'thanks to') and (from 'of the') are nonetheless frequent. In-word elision is usually marked with a
hyphen, as in (from , 'Dr'). Some early guides used and advocated the use of apostrophes between word parts, to aid recognition of such
compound words as , 'guitarist'; but in the latter case, modern usage is to use either a hyphen or a middle dot when disambiguation is necessary, as in
ĉas-hundo or
ĉas·hundo, "a hunting dog", not to be mispronounced as
ĉa.ŝun.do. • In Finnish, the apostrophe is used in inflected forms of words whose basic form has a "k" between similar vowels, to show that the "k" has elided in the inflected form: for example the word '
("raw") becomes ' in the plural. The apostrophe shows that the identical vowels on either side of it belong to different syllables. • The
Galician language standard admits the use of the apostrophe () for contractions that normally do not use it (e.g.: de + a= da), when the second element begins a proper noun, generally a title: (the plot of A Esmorga [title of a novel]). They are also used to reproduce oral elisions and, as stated below, to join (or split) commercial names of popular public establishments such as restaurants (, The pot). • In
Ganda, when a word ending with a
vowel is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, the final vowel of the first word is
elided and the initial vowel of the second word
lengthened in compensation. When the first word is a
monosyllable, this elision is represented in the orthography with an apostrophe: in '''' 'the father of the children', '''' ('of') becomes
w; in '''' ('who is it?'), '''' ('who') becomes
y. But the final vowel of a
polysyllable is always written, even if it is elided in speech: '''' ('this man'), not *'
, because ' ('man') is a polysyllable. • In German an apostrophe is used almost exclusively to indicate omitted letters. It must not be used for plurals or most of the possessive forms. The only exceptions are the possessive cases of names ending in an "s"-sound as in '
, or "to prevent ambiguities" in all other possessive cases of names, as in ' (referring to the female name '
, not the male name '). The English/Saxon style of using an apostrophe for possession was introduced after the spelling reform, but is strongly disagreed on by native speakers, and discouraged. Although possessive usage (beyond the exceptions) is widespread, it is often deemed incorrect. The German equivalent of "greengrocers' apostrophes" would be the derogatory '''' ('idiot's apostrophe'; ). • In modern printings of
Ancient Greek, apostrophes are also used to mark elision. Some Ancient Greek words that end in short vowels elide when the next word starts with a vowel. For example, many Ancient Greek authors would write ('
) for (') and ('
) for ('). Such modern usage should be carefully distinguished from
polytonic Greek's native
rough and
smooth breathing marks, which usually appear as a form of rounded apostrophe. • In
Hebrew, the
geresh (׳), often typed as an apostrophe, is used to denote abbreviations. A double
geresh (״), known by the dual form
gershayim, is used to denote
acronyms or
initialisms; it is inserted before (i.e., to the right of) the last letter of the acronym. Examples: (abbreviation for , 'professor', '
professor'); ('''', '
P.S.'). The
geresh is also used to indicate the elision of a sound; however, this use is much less frequent, and confined to the purpose of imitating a natural, informal utterance, for example: ('
– short for , ', 'I am/do not'). • In Irish, the past tense of verbs beginning with a vowel, or with
fh followed by a vowel, begins with ''d'
(elision of do''), for example becomes ('opened') and becomes ('returned'). The
copula is often elided to '''', and ('to'), ('my') etc. are elided before
f and vowels. • In
Italian it is used for elision with pronouns, as in instead of ; with articles, as in instead of ; and for truncation, as in instead of . Stylistically, sentences beginning with È (as in ) are often rendered as E' in newspapers, to minimise
leading (inter-line spacing). • In modern
Norwegian, the apostrophe marks that a word has been contracted, such as '
from ' ('have/has not'). Unlike English and French, such elisions are not accepted as part of standard orthography but are used to create a more "oral style" in writing. The apostrophe is also used to mark the genitive for words that end in an -s sound: words ending in -s, -x, and -z, some speakers also including words ending in the sound . As Norwegian does not form the plural with -s, there is no need to distinguish between an -s forming the possessive and the -s forming the plural. Therefore, we have '''' ('man') and '''' ('man's'), without apostrophe, but '''' ('naval pilot') and ''''' ('naval pilot's'). Indicating the possessive for the two former American presidents named George Bush, whose names end in , could be written as both '
(simply adding an -s to the name) and ' (adding an apostrophe to the end of the name). • In
Portuguese the apostrophe is used to reproduce certain popular pronunciations such as (pay attention to yourself) or in a few combinations of word, when there is the suppression of the vowel of the preposition
de in certain compound words (the ones formed by two or more stems) such as ('water tower'), ('guineafowl'), (a plant species, ), ('morning star'), etc. The apostrophe is most commonly not used in the word
pra, the reduced or popular form of the preposition
para, but some advocate for its used in preposition + article contractions: ''para + a = p'ra/pra
, para + o = p'ro/pro'', etc.. • In modern Spanish the apostrophe is no longer used to indicate elision in standard writing, although it can sometimes be found in older poetry for that purpose. Instead Spanish writes out the words in full, for example '
and ', and the elisions are supplied by the speaker. There is an exception for the contractions '
and ', which respectively stand for ['
+ '] and ['
+ '], and which use no apostrophe. • In
Swedish, the apostrophe marks an elision, such as '
, short for ' ('in the city'), to make the text more similar to the spoken language. This is relaxed style, fairly rarely used, and would not be used by traditional newspapers in political articles, but could be used in entertainment related articles and similar. The formal way to denote elision in Swedish is by using colon, e.g. '
for ' which is rarely spelled out in full. The apostrophe must not be used to indicate the possessive except – although not mandatory – when there is already an
s,
x or
z present in the base form, as in ''''. •
Welsh uses the apostrophe to mark elision of the definite article ('the') following a vowel (
a,
e,
i,
o,
u,
y, or, in Welsh,
w), as in , 'to the house'. It is also used with the particle , such as with , 'she is'.
As a glottal stop Several languages and transliteration systems use the apostrophe or some similar mark to indicate a
glottal stop, sometimes considering it a letter of the alphabet: • In several
Finno-Ugric languages, such as
Estonian and
Finnish; for example in the Finnish word '
, being the genitive or accusative of ' ('raw'). • In
Guarani, it is called '
, and used in the words ' (language, to speak), '
(grass), ' (sterile). • In
Hawaiian, the
okina , an inverted apostrophe, is often rendered as . It is considered a letter of the alphabet. •
Mayan. • In the
Tongan language, the apostrophe is called a '''' and is the last letter of the alphabet. It represents the glottal stop. Like the okina, it is inverted. • Various other
Austronesian languages, such as
Samoan,
Tahitian, and
Chamorro. •
Tetum, one of the official languages of
East Timor. • The Brazilian native
Tupi language. •
Mossi (Mooré), a language of
Burkina Faso. • In
Võro, the apostrophe is used in parallel with the letter
q as symbol of plural, for example
majaq or
maja ('houses'), imperative
annaq or
anna', and in all other word forms with glottal stop. • Several
fictional languages such as
Klingon,
D'ni,
Mando'a or
Na'vi add apostrophes to make names appear "alien". The apostrophe represents sounds resembling the glottal stop in the
Turkic languages and in some
romanizations of
Semitic languages, including
Arabic and
Hebrew. In that case, the letter ''
'ayn'' (Arabic ع and Hebrew ע) is correspondingly transliterated with the opening single quotation mark.
As a mark of palatalization or non-palatalization Some languages and
transliteration systems use the apostrophe to mark the presence, or the lack of,
palatalization: • In
Belarusian and
Ukrainian, the apostrophe is used between a consonant and a following "soft" (
iotated) vowel (Be.:
е,
ё,
ю,
я; Uk.:
є,
ї,
ю,
я) to indicate that
no palatalization of the preceding consonant takes place, and the vowel is pronounced in the same way as at the beginning of a word. It therefore marks a morpheme boundary before and, in Belarusian, is a letter of the alphabet (as the hard sign in Russian is) rather than a simple punctuation mark in English, as it is not a punctuation mark in Belarusian. It appears frequently in Ukrainian, as, for instance, in the words: () 'five', () 'departure', () 'united', () 'to clear up, explain', () play (drama), etc. • In
Russian and some derived alphabets, the same function has been served by the
hard sign (ъ, formerly called
yer). But the apostrophe saw some use as a substitute after 1918, when Soviet authorities enforced an orthographic reform by confiscating
movable type bearing the hard sign from stubborn printing houses in Petrograd. • In some
Latin transliterations of certain
Cyrillic alphabets (for
Belarusian,
Russian, and
Ukrainian), the apostrophe is used to replace the
soft sign (ь, indicating palatalization of the preceding consonant), e.g.,
Русь is transliterated ''
Rus' according to the BGN/PCGN system. The prime symbol is also used for the same purpose. Some of these transliteration schemes use a double apostrophe ( ˮ ) to represent the apostrophe in Ukrainian and Belarusian text and the hard sign (ъ) in Russian text, e.g. Ukrainian '' ('Slavic') is transliterated as ''''. • Some
Karelian orthographies use an apostrophe to indicate palatalization, e.g. '''' ('to give advice'), '''' ('just (like)'), '''' ('to revive'). • In
Võro an apostrophe is often (also in the Võro Wikipedia) used as a simplification to replace the regular Võro palatalization mark, which is the accute accent, for example ''as'aq
replacing regular form aśaq'' ('things').
To separate morphemes Some languages use the apostrophe to separate the
root of a word and its
affixes, especially if the root is foreign and unassimilated. • In
Danish an apostrophe is sometimes used to join the
enclitic definite article to words of foreign origin, or to other words that would otherwise look awkward. For example, one would write '
to mean "the IP address". There is some variation in what is considered "awkward enough" to warrant an apostrophe; for instance, long-established words such as ' ('company') or '''' ('level') might be written '
and ', but will generally be seen without an apostrophe. Due to Danish influence, this usage of the apostrophe can also be seen in Norwegian, but is non-standard – a hyphen should be used instead: e.g. (the CD). • In
Estonian, apostrophes can be used in the declension of some foreign names to separate the stem from any
declension endings; e.g., '
(genitive case) or ' (
illative case) of
Monet. • In
Finnish, apostrophes are used in the declension of foreign names or loan words that end in a consonant when written but are pronounced with a vowel ending, e.g. '''' ('in a show'), '''' ('to Bordeaux'). For Finnish as well as
Swedish, there is a closely related
use of the colon. • In
Polish, the apostrophe is used exclusively for marking inflections of words and word-like elements (but not
acronyms – a hyphen is used instead) whose spelling conflicts with the normal rules of inflection. This mainly affects foreign words and names. For instance, one would correctly write '''' for "
Al Gore's campaign". In this example, '
is spelled without an apostrophe, since its spelling and pronunciation fit into normal Polish rules; but ' needs the apostrophe, because
e disappears from the pronunciation, changing the inflection pattern. This rule is often misunderstood as calling for an apostrophe after
all foreign words, regardless of their pronunciation, yielding the incorrect '''', for example. The effect is akin to the greengrocers' apostrophe • In
Turkish,
proper nouns are capitalised and an apostrophe is inserted between the noun and any following
inflectional suffix, e.g. '
("in Istanbul"), contrasting with ' ("in school", '
is a common noun) and ' ('Istanbulite',
-lu is a
derivational suffix). • In
Welsh the apostrophe is used with infixed pronouns in order to distinguish them from the preceding word (e.g. '''', 'and my sister' as opposed to '''', 'about a sister').
Miscellaneous uses in other languages • In
Breton, the combination ''
is used for the consonant (like ch
in Scottish English Loch Ness''), while '
is used for the consonant (as in French ' or English
she). • In
Czech, an apostrophe is used for writing to indicate spoken or informal language where the writer wants to express the natural way of informal speech, but it should not be used in formal text or text of a serious nature. E.g., instead of '''' ('he read'), the word form '
is used. ' is the informal variant of the verb form ''
, at least in some varieties. These two words are the same in meaning, but to use the informal form gives the text a more natural tone as if a friend were talking to you. Furthermore, the same as in the Slovak case below holds for lowercase t
and d'', and for the two-digit year notation. • In
Finnish, one of the
consonant gradation patterns is the change of a
k into a
hiatus, e.g. '
→ ' ('a pile' → 'a pile's'). This hiatus has to be indicated in spelling with an apostrophe if a long vowel (represented by doubling (e.g. ) or the final vowel of a diphthong (e.g. ) would be immediately followed by the same vowel, e.g. '
→ ', '
→ '. This is in contrast to compound words, where the problem of a vowel recurring over a syllable break is solved with a
hyphen, e.g. '''', 'land area'. Similarly, the apostrophe is used to mark the
hiatus (contraction) that occurs in poetry, e.g. '
for ' ('where is'). •
Galician restaurants sometimes use '
in their names following the standard article ' ('the'). • In
Ganda, ''
(pronounced ) is used in place of ŋ
on keyboards where this character is not available. The apostrophe distinguishes it from the letter combination '' (pronounced ), which has separate use in the language. Compare this with the Swahili usage below. • In
Hebrew, the
geresh (a diacritic similar to the apostrophe and often represented by one) is used for several purposes other than to mark an elision: • As an adjacent to letters to show sounds that are not represented in the
Hebrew alphabet: Sounds such as (English
j as in
job), (English
th as in
thigh), and (English
ch as in
check) are indicated using ג, ת, and צ with a
geresh (informally
chupchik). For example, the name
George is spelled in Hebrew (with representing the first and last consonants). • To denote a
Hebrew numeral (e.g., , which stands for '50') • To denote a Hebrew letter which stands for itself (e.g., – the letter
mem) •
Gershayim (a double geresh) to denote a Hebrew letter name (e.g., – the letter
lamed) • Another (rarer) use of geresh is to denote the last syllable (which in some cases, but not all, is a
suffix) in some words of
Yiddish origin (e.g., ). • In the
Middle Ages and the
Early modern period, gershayim were also used to denote foreign words, as well as a means of
emphasis. • In Italian, an apostrophe is sometimes used as a substitute for a
grave or an
acute accent. This may be done after an initial E or an accented final vowel (when writing in all-capitals), or when the proper form of the letter is unavailable for technical reasons. So a sentence beginning ('It is true that...') may be written as . This form is often seen in newspapers, as it is the only case of an accent above the
cap height and its omission permits the text to be more closely spaced (
leading). Less commonly, a forename like might be rendered as
Niccolo, or
NICCOLO;
perché, as
perche, or
PERCHE. This applies only to machine or computer writing, in the absence of a suitable keyboard. • In
Jèrriais, one of the uses of the apostrophe is to mark
gemination, or consonant length: For example, '
represents , ' , '
, ' , and '''' (contrasted with , , , , and ). • In
Lithuanian, the apostrophe is occasionally used to add a Lithuanized ending on an international word, e.g. "parking'as", "Skype'as", "Facebook'as". • In standard
Lojban orthography, the apostrophe is a letter in its own right (called ) that can appear only between two vowels, and is phonemically realised as either or, more rarely, . • In
Macedonian the apostrophe is sometimes used to represent the sound
schwa, which can be found on dialectal levels, but not in the Standard Macedonian. • In
Slovak, the
caron over lowercase
t,
d,
l, and uppercase
L consonants resembles an apostrophe, for example,
ď,
ť,
ľ, and
Ľ. This is especially so in certain common typographic renderings. But it is non-standard to use an apostrophe instead of the caron. There is also
l with an acute accent:
ĺ,
Ĺ. In Slovak the apostrophe is properly used only to indicate
elision in certain words ('
, as an abbreviated form of ' ('you are'), or '
for ' ('up')); however, these elisions are restricted to poetry (with a few exceptions). Moreover, the apostrophe is also used before a two-digit year number (to indicate the omission of the first two digits): '''' (usually used for 1987). • In
Swahili, an apostrophe after '
shows that there is no sound of after the sound; that is, that the ' is pronounced as in English
singer, not as in English
finger. • In Switzerland, the apostrophe is used as
thousands separator alongside the
fixed space (e.g., 2'000'000 or for two million) in all four
national languages. • In the new
Uzbek Latin alphabet adopted in 2000, the apostrophe serves as a
diacritical mark to distinguish different phonemes written with the same letter: it differentiates ''
(corresponding to Cyrillic ў'') from '
, and ' (Cyrillic
ғ) from ''
. This avoids the use of special characters, allowing Uzbek to be typed with ease in ordinary ASCII on any Latin keyboard. In addition, a postvocalic apostrophe in Uzbek represents the glottal stop phoneme derived from Arabic hamzah
or ʼayn, replacing Cyrillic ъ''. • In English
Yorkshire dialect, the apostrophe is used to represent the word
the, which is contracted to a more glottal (or 'unreleased') /t/ sound. Most users will write ''in t'barn'' ('in the barn'), ''on t'step'' ('on the step'); and those unfamiliar with Yorkshire speech will often make these sound like
intuh barn and
ontuh step. A more accurate rendition might be ''in't barn
and on't step
, although even this does not truly convey correct Yorkshire pronunciation as the t'' is more like a
glottal stop. • In the
pinyin (hànyǔ pīnyīn) system of
romanization for
Standard Chinese, an apostrophe is often loosely said to separate syllables in a word where ambiguity could arise. Example: the standard romanization for the name of the city ''
Xī'ān includes an apostrophe to distinguish it from a single-syllable word . More strictly, it is standard to place an apostrophe only before every a
, e
, or o
that starts a new syllable after the first if it is not preceded by a hyphen or a dash. Examples: Tiān'ānmén, Yǎ'ān; but simply Jǐnán, in which the syllables are ji
and nan
, since the absence of an apostrophe shows that the syllables are not jin
and an
(contrast Jīn'ān''). This is a kind of morpheme-separation marking • In the largely superseded
Wade–Giles romanization for Standard Chinese, an apostrophe marks
aspiration of the preceding consonant sound. Example: in
tsê (pinyin
ze) the consonant represented by
ts is unaspirated, but in ''ts'ê
(pinyin ce
) the consonant represented by ts'' is aspirated. Some academic users of the system write this character as a
spiritus asper ( or ) or single left (opening)
quotation mark (‘). • In some systems of romanization for the Japanese, the apostrophe is used between
moras in ambiguous situations, to differentiate between, for example, '
and ' + ''''. This is similar to the practice in Pinyin. • In science fiction and fantasy, the apostrophe is often used in fictional names, sometimes to indicate a
glottal stop (for example
Mitth'raw'nuruodo in
Star Wars), but also sometimes simply for decoration. == Typographic form ==