This pair of punctuation glyphs serves to enclose and isolate spoken or cited text within a passage, appearing as either standalone or paired strokes. In United Kingdom editorial design, the choice between using a single or double stroke format depends entirely on individual house styling rules, though general practice defaults to double strokes for primary citations and single strokes to nest internal quotes.
Across different languages, regional styling dictates unique appearances:
- Spanish: guillemets; i.e., «Typography» (in publishing; quotation marks in regular use)
- French, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish: guillemets, i.e., «Typography»
- German: inverted guillemets; i.e., »Typography«
These genuine typographic symbols are distinct from the uniform, vertical marks popularized by mechanical typewriters. Because of their curved or stylized architecture, true versions are frequently called typographer’s or curly quotes. When raw copy contains outdated, vertical marks, a designer must manually correct them or implement software workflows, such as automatic replacement scripts, to restore proper editorial styling.
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