I read an article off of Yahoo! mail this morning with great interest because it’s an issue I face everyday as a Latina writer writing about Latino experiences. To accent or not to accent, that is the question and according to the article I’m not the only one asking.

Newspapers have long maintained that technological problems and editorial confusion make it too difficult to add accents, officially known as diacritical marks. For Colon, now a faculty member at The Poynter Institute of journalism in St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s a question of accuracy, one of the basic tenets of journalism.

The absence of accents can change the pronunciation and the meaning of a word.

The name Pena, without the tilde over the “n,” means shame. The Spanish word for year without that squiggle becomes anus.

To be completely honest, I am inconsistant with my use of accent marks when I’m writing Spanish language names and Spanish words. Probably the only exception is when I write the word year in Spanish, año. When I forget the tilde, my inner child laughs at having written anus and my adult writer quickly fixes it. But what about names and other places? At the very least it’s laziness. I feel like I don’t have the time to figure out the special combination of keys I need to press so that when I’m talking about putting my hair in a moño (ponytail)no one thinks I’m putting a mono (monkey)in my hair. I sometimes too easily fall back on the “curse of the Nuyorican” excuse, claiming that since my Spanish was taught alongside English, I’m not always clear where accents belong. At the worst, it’s disrespectful. Just like I insist that my daughter’s name be pronounced not like one of the southern states in the U.S. , Latinos and others are right to insist that accent marks be used when writing their names, where they are, where they come from, etc.

While the article says it’s an issue of accuracy, I also see it as an issue of respect and I’m calling myself out on my own inconsistancies.

Via / Yahoo! News
Image Via / Language Facts Archive