The case of baby Fañch's ñ and that of the minister

We are in the era of the first Macron government. Editing an article about Laurent Nunez, recently appointed Secretary of State to the Minister of the Interior, I check the spelling of his name, which seems to me to have a tilde in the second N that doesn't appear in the text.

The tilde is what is called a "diacritical mark," or simply a "diacritic," from the ancient Greek diakritikos , "which serves to distinguish." Diacritics are those small signs that were added to letters from the Renaissance onward to modify the pronunciation of words, at the time when it became clear that the letters inherited from Latin no longer allowed the sounds of French to be reproduced faithfully enough. Our language has five official diacritical marks. The first, historically, was the acute accent on the E.

Then come the grave accent, the diaeresis, the circumflex accent, and the cedilla—the only French diacritic that does not appear above a letter, and the only one to modify a consonant. Our European neighbors have opted for other signs: there is the astonishing little circle on the Swedish A, artistically named "circle in chief," the Norwegian barred O, and, closer to us geographically, the Spanish tilde, that little snake on the N that indicates that it is pronounced "gne" instead of "n."

So? Nunez or Nuñez? I've looked everywhere, but I can't say for sure. There are several interviews online in which he claims to be attached to this tilde, a testament to his family's Andalusian origins, and that he intends his surname to be pronounced ("nunièze," not "nunèze") to reflect this. Surprisingly, however, on the government's website, which proofreaders believe is authoritative for ministers' names and official functions, "Nunez" has no accent.

Why? It so happens that Mr. Nun(ñ)ez entered the government at a time when a judicial-familial-typographical tragedy was playing out in Brittany around the tilde. The tilde is not officially considered French, but it does exist in Breton, and Breton parents who wanted to name their newborn Fañch (diminutive of Frañsez, the local equivalent of François), with a tilde over the N, were banned from doing so.

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