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The Great Vowel Shift that occurred between 13 saw a great deal of phonetic changes occur, essentially leading to a condition where our spelling reflects a language that once didn’t really need accent marks, but now probably really does. Part of the work of developing a printing press involved standardizing the English language, and because this was largely up to Caxton’s discretion in the very beginning, he opted for what was familiar to him - the Middle English, or “King’s English,” of the London area, as well as certain Flemish spelling habits from his apprentice days (like the use of the silent letter “h” in “ghost,” and a general lack of accent marks).īasically what happened since is that English pronunciation continued to morph and change, but our spelling has largely remained frozen in time (for instance, the “k” in “knight” used to be pronounced, but we no longer say it how it’s spelled). One big development that changed modern English as we know it was the development of the first English printing press by a man named William Caxton in the late 1400s. Old English contained letters that have since gone extinct, like the thorn (þ). Like language itself, alphabets tend to evolve over time. So why, then, does English lack accent marks? And is this even a valid question to be asking? Ye Olde English Alphabet

English spelling is really weird and inconsistent - so much so that students of the language are pretty much resigned to just memorizing words individually (as opposed to learning the rules of pronunciation and having it all make sense). We’ve got through, thorough and enough - and none of those words are pronounced the same. Eastern European tongues like Polish and Slovenian are no exception either, and some Asian languages that use Latin script (like Vietnamese) are also chock-full of them.Īnd English is a language that, frankly, could use a little more guidance and specificity in its orthography.

Have you ever thought about the fact that a lot of other Latin alphabet languages besides English have accent marks? Spanish and French are two of the most immediate examples that come to mind for most people who were schooled in the American education system, but consider German, too, with its characteristic umlauts, or any of the Scandinavian tongues like Danish or Norwegian.