Combining double grave accent

In Croatian and Serbian accent notation, it marks short falling stress. The syllable is stressed, lasts briefly, and drops in pitch. This is one mark in a four-mark system alongside the grave, acute, and inverted breve; dictionaries and linguistic texts use them to show pronunciation rather than ordinary spelling.

The medieval Kiev Folia manuscript used Greek-derived signs to guide pitch and stress in the 10th–12th centuries. Accent marking returned in the 14th century and became systematic in the early 17th century. Vuk Karadžić used this distinct double-grave sign selectively in 1818; Đuro Daničić and Croatian Vukovci (followers of Karadžić's language reforms) standardized the four-mark system by the mid-19th century.

The reading changes with the notation system. The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet, a system for writing speech sounds) uses it for extra-low level tone: a pitch held very low through the syllable. Slovene tonal notation can use it for a short, high pitch that falls; Slovene stress-only notation instead uses a single grave for short stress. Check the transcription key before reading the mark.

how do I type a double grave accent

Type the base letter first, then the mark. Use the order a + ̏, displayed as ȁ. The mark has no advance width of its own, so it attaches to the preceding character and takes no separate text column.

For a single-character letter-like result, use a precomposed vowel when available, such as ȁ. It represents the same a-plus-mark sequence; the difference is how the text encodes it.

On Linux, the Serbian XKB keyboard layout has a combiningkeys variant whose third-level 8 key emits the raw mark. As of 2026, LaTeX documents using the TIPA package for phonetic notation can use \H*v to place it over a base; replace v with the letter.