guillemet

Guillemet (plural guillemets) is the name of a pair of typographic quotation marks used to enclose direct speech or other quoted material in many Western languages. The marks take the form of angle quotation marks: opening guillemet left-pointing angle («) and closing guillemet right-pointing angle (»). In languages such as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and others, guillemets are the standard quotation marks, while English-language typography typically uses straight quotation marks. In some translations or design work, guillemets may be used in English to evoke a European flavor, but this usage is stylistic rather than normative.

Etymology and history: The term guillemet derives from Guillaume, the French form of William. The marks were adopted into European typography during the early modern period and became a standard quotation convention in several languages. They are part of a broader family of angle quotes used in many scripts.

Usage and typography: The guillemets function as quotation marks and are typically paired, with the opening mark placed before the quoted material and the closing mark after. French typography commonly inserts a non-breaking space before an opening guillemet and after a closing guillemet (for example: « Bonjour »). Nested quotation often requires switching to other quotation marks inside the outer guillemets.

Digital representation and variants: In modern computing, guillemets are encoded in Unicode as U+00AB (LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK) and U+00BB (RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK). HTML entities include « and ». Some languages also use single-angle quotation marks (U+2039 and U+203A) or alternative nesting conventions.