VivirLatino

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.

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