Guillemet

Shape

Guillemets are smaller than less-than and greater-than signs, which in turn are smaller than angle brackets.

Use as quotation marks

Guillemets are used pointing «outwards» to indicate speech in these languages and regions:

• Albanian
• Arabic
• Armenian
• Asturian
• Azerbaijani (mostly in the Cyrillic script)
• Belarusian
• Breton
• Bulgarian (used before 1990, now rarely used; „...“ is official)
• Catalan
• Chinese (only used for book titles, movie titles, magazine titles, etc.)
• Esperanto (usage varies)
• Estonian (marked usage; „...“ prevails)
• Franco-Provençal
• French (spaced out by « narrow non-breaking spaces », except no spaces in Switzerland)
• Galician
• Greek
• Italian
• Khmer
• Northern Korean (in Southern Korean, “...” is used)
• Kurdish
• Latvian (stūrainās pēdiņas)
• Norwegian
• Persian
• Portuguese (used mostly in European Portuguese, due to its presence in typical computer keyboards; considered obsolete in Brazilian Portuguese)
• Romanian; only to indicate a quotation within a quotation
• Russian, and some languages of the former Soviet Union using Cyrillic script („...“ is also used for nested quotes and in hand-written text.)
• Spanish (uncommon in daily usage, but commonly used in publishing)
• Swiss languages
• Turkish (dated usage; almost entirely replaced with “...” by late 20th century)
• Uyghur
• Ukrainian
• Uzbek (mostly in the Cyrillic script)
• Vietnamese (previously, now “...” is official)

Guillemets are used pointing »inwards« to indicate speech in these languages:

• Croatian (preferred by typographers, alternate pair „...“ is in common use)
• Czech (traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails)
• Danish (“...” is also used)
• Esperanto (very uncommon)
• German (guillemets are preferred for books, while „...“ is preferred in newspapers and handwriting; see above for usage in Swiss German)
• Hungarian (only used „inside a section »as a secondary quote« marked by the usual quotes” like this)
• Polish (used to indicate a quote inside a quote as defined by dictionaries; more common usage in practice. See also: Polish orthography)
• Serbian (marked usage; „...“ prevails)
• Slovak (traditional but declining usage; „...“ prevails)
• Slovene („...“ and “...” also used)
• Swedish (this style, and »...» are considered typographically fancy; ”...” is the common form of quotation)

Guillemets are used pointing right (»like this») to indicate speech in these languages:

• Finnish (”...” is the common and correct form)
• Swedish (this style, and »...« are considered typographically fancy; ”...” is the common form of quotation)

Encoding

Double guillemets are present in many 8-bit extended ASCII character sets. They were at 0xAE and 0xAF (174 and 175) in CP437 on the IBM PC, and 0xC7 and 0xC8 in Mac OS Roman, and placed in several of ISO 8859 code pages (namely: -1, -7, -8, -9, -13, -15, -16) at 0xAB and 0xBB (171 and 187).

Microsoft added the single guillemets to CP1252 and similar sets used in Windows at 0x8B and 0x9B (139 and 155) (where the ISO standard placed C1 control codes).

Unicode

The ISO 8859 locations were inherited by Unicode, which added the single guillemets at new locations:

• U+00AB « LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK («)
• U+00BB » RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (»)
• U+2039 ‹ SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (‹)
• U+203A › SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK (›)

Despite their names, the characters are mirrored when used in right-to-left contexts.

For entry methods on keyboards that do not provide these symbols, see Unicode input.