TOPIC:

What is the US English policy on foreign placenames that contain accented letters.

When the project was created, I was told that Americans ignore accents, and so would write "Cote d'Ivoire" instead of "Côte d'Ivoire".

The accents are then added in the various translations. So, en-GB translates "Cote d'Ivoire" to "Côte d'Ivoire".

Is that still the case today?

I need to add the country "Curaçao". Would americans write this with or without the cedilla?

I would suspect that most (but not all) Americans would use the keyboard they have and type “Curacao” because their standard keyboard would not have the cedilla. But I’m not sure a “Policy” exists that is universal.

However, as I write this my Apple iPad corrected the spelling to “Curaçao” with the cedilla!

Because, I can reproduce the ç and the name is understandable in English I personally would not translate to the English alphabet. I do this with Latin based alphabets such as, Scandinavian, German, Spanish, French as well.

But this being said, most Americans would only use their English 26 letter alphabet when entering places! Newspapers will very often use accented letters for common French, Spanish words, Peña, Café come to mind!

Most Americans ignore the accents.

Agree

THIS American takes pride in spelling things correctly. I would say those who don't are either lazy or don't know any better.

If they don't want to spell "Côte d'Ivoire" correctly, they might as well just type "Ivory Coast."

I've had people try to tell me accents aren't important in Spanish. I guess that allows me to wish them a "prospero ano nuevo"
Another Spanish example: "se" is a pronoun and "sé" is a verb.

The official arbiter of place names in the US is the Board of Geographic Names. They've outsourced the issue of non-US names to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which appears to like accents; I used their web form to search for "cote d'ivoire" which I can type easily, and it gives the name "Côte d’Ivoire"; same with curacao->Curaçao.

In the old days (pre-Unicode), even the display of accented characters was difficult for those of us in the US. Then, with the advent of the Unicode-enabled web, it became trivial to search for e.g. "joao" and copy and paste the correct form João into most applications and sites. Now, as Ken points out, things like autocorrect and case- and accent-independent search make it even easier.

So please, go with Curaçao, Côte d'Ivoire, etc. and make João happy.

Thanks,

-Ed.