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I was discovering lately that the only French word using "ù" was the only word "où" which means "where".

On the french layout keyboard (aka AZERTY), there's a key only dedicated to this "ù".

We were wondering if there are any other languages that is using the character: "ù".

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    Wikipedia has some discussion of the accent in general: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent It looks like ù is used in Italian. Sep 2, 2015 at 0:22
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    Grave accents are often used to refer to tones in tone languages. Depending on the tone system, they are frequently used for a falling tone in a system, just as an acute accent is used for a rising tone . Like the Pinyin representation of 'hemp' for the second (rising) tone, and 'scold' for the fourth (falling) tone.
    – jlawler
    Sep 2, 2015 at 13:27
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    Vietnamese. There are "tons" of diacritics in Vietnamese Sep 14, 2015 at 16:36
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    in such case chinese pinyin also have ù... like "bù" that means "not" Sep 14, 2015 at 21:00

2 Answers 2

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Yes, in Italian: the word "più", for example.

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  • But Italians don't generally use AZERTY keyboards.
    – tripleee
    Jun 13, 2018 at 7:17
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In Vietnamese there are 6 tones and the grave accent is used to indicate the falling tone. "ù" itself means "fat". But the tone is applied to every syllable in Vietnamese, hence any vowels can have the grave accent on them. For example à, ằ, ầ, è, ề, ì, ò, ồ, ờ, ù, ừ, ỳ...

You can also see that in Hanyu Pinyin like yùnmǔ (韻母)

I'd assume it's also common in other tonal languages which use Latin script and diacritics for indicating tone


Some other non-tonal languages that also use ù

In Ligurian, the grave accent marks the accented short vowel of a word in à (sound [a]), è (sound [ɛ]), ì (sound [i]) and ù (sound [y]).

In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel, such as cùis [kʰuːʃ] ("subject"), compared with cuir [kʰuɾʲ] ("put"). The use of acute accents to denote the rarer close long vowels, leaving the grave accents for the open long ones, is seen in older texts, but it is no longer allowed according to the new orthographical conventions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent

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