It may surprise you to read that English is written without diacritics due to French influence….

Why English doesn’t use accents

It may surprise you to read that English is written without diacritics due to French influence. After all, French is written with plenty of diacritics: écouter ‘listen’, à ‘to’, château ‘castle’, Noël ‘Christmas’, Français ‘French’.

But the French that the Normans brought to England was not French as it’s spoken and written today: it was a different, older form of the language — and one written very differently from the French you would find in a livre today.

One big difference between the French of 1066 and the French of 2025 is in the use of diacritics. Diacritics only became a part of standard French writing much, much later than the time of the Norman Conquest. So the French brought over by the Normans was written without them. And when these scribes took up the task of writing English, they carried over their French habits of writing.

In both French and English, the Latin alphabet’s limited set of letters was insufficient to write all of the sounds needed in the language. For example, Latin had no th sound, as in faith. But Old French did have such a sound: since it was made in the same region of the mouth as the t sound (with the tip of the tongue), French scribes used the combination th to write it. The t told you what basic kind of sound it was, and the h told you that it was a different sound than the one you expected. So for these French scribes, adding another letter solved exactly the same problem that later French spelling used diacritics for.

This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to spell sounds that the alphabet didn’t have special letters for. This is why English has combinations like sh, th, ee, oo, ou that each make only a single sound.