Why you have an accent in a foreign language

OPEN A TEXTBOOK for a foreign language, and one of the first things you see is an alphabet, enumerating the letters used in the writing system and the sounds they represent. This is obviously crucial for unfamiliar systems, say those of Greek or Russian. But even for languages that rely on the Latin alphabet, the guide will explain how diacritics such as accent marks change a letter’s pronunciation, and quirks such as the -ch- in German or -gl- in Italian. (The first often sounds like the ch in Scottish loch, the second like the -ll- in million.)