Punctuation in other languages- what is the same, and what is not?

Punctuation plays a vital role in the ability to read and write texts, and communicate effectively. Various punctuation marks exist, to indicate pauses in text, closures and emphasis. Without punctuation, it would be quite difficult to read and interpret written pieces, or at the very least, it would cause confusion and debate about how a particular sentence should be read and understood.

Among the 293 writing systems for the thousands of languages in the world, punctuation marks and their use are not universal, although there are some similarities. In ancient languages, punctuation was more or less non-existent, but this article will look at the similarities and differences between modern punctuation marks and their usage across several languages we speak today. See the table below for a comparison.

*Used in languages such as Arabic itself, Urdu and Farsi

In French, spaces are usually added before punctuation marks, whereas in Japanese commas are used invertedly due to its traditional vertical writing style (like Chinese). Japanese additionally uses a white enclosed circle to mean a full stop. Periods are rare in Thai, as the language uses minimal punctuation. In Thai, spaces are between phrases rather than words. In Hindi, the full stop is designated with a vertical bar.

Guillements or chevrons are used in French to denote parentheses. Guillements are also used in Spanish and Russian- and sometimes also in Italian, Portuguese and other European languages- with North Korea using single chevrons like <  > . (South Korea still use single quotation marks). Meanwhile, German uses inverted quotation marks.

As for question and exclamation marks, Spanish uses inverted marks to place emphasis, while Arabic scripts uses a backward question mark to mirror its right-to-left writing style. On the other hand, Greek uses a semi-colon mark ( ; ) to signify a question.

Greek also uses a raised point to indicate colons and semi-colons. Arabic utilises an inverted semi-colon to reflect its script.

In Japanese and Chinese, punctuation for quotation marks are used differently- in Japanese, they are called Kagikakko. Chinese uses full-width punctuation marks, which are larger than Western languages’ punctuation. This is because Chinese uses the vertical writing style like Japanese.

Chinese further uses a six-dot ellipsis compared to English’s three.

An extra punctuation symbol between characters in Arabic is Kashida, which is used to justify text.

Regarding number formatting, English and Portuguese separate thousands with a comma, and use a decimal point for decimals. In other European languages, this is reversed. In India, the first thousand is denoted with a comma, and then every two figures afterwards a comma is used. See the table below to visualise this for examples.

In conclusion, modern-day punctuation marks differ from language to language, though some punctuation is considerably the same across related languages.

Contributions by Manisha Halkhoree

Published: 22/07/25

Last updated: 22/07/25

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