French Capitalization - Accented Capitals

Should capital letters be accented in French?

You may have heard that capital letters are not supposed to be accented, when in fact whether or not to use accents on capital letters is entirely up to you. Most of the time they are not essential, and thus most French speakers leave them off. However, there are two instances where I recommend always using accents on capital letters:

1. When the accent or lack thereof distinguishes between two words. Look at what happens when biscuits salés (salted crackers) is written in all caps:
   BISCUITS SALES (dirty crackers) - yum, yum! Definitely better to write BISCUITS SALÉS, n'est-ce pas? ;-)
   More examples
     
2. In proper names, such as the name of a company or a person's name. I feel that it's important both to show respect to organizations/people by spelling their names correctly, as well as to make sure that the person who reads the name knows how it should be spelled. If you don't write the accent when the name is in all in caps, your reader may not realize that there is an accent when later writing the name in regular letters.

Personally, I nearly always use accents on capital letters - it just makes more sense to me.
 

1. Introduction to Capitalization 2. Variable Capitalization 3. Accented Capitals 4. Capitalization of Titles

Accent homographs     Typing French accents Writing lessons      French Grammar

  

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