Writing conventions used to differentiate similar letters in a language to indicate linguistic clues, such as a change in pronunciation or verb conjugation. For example, in French, an accent mark marks a verb in the past participle such that coupé is the past participle and coupe is the first-person, singular, present tense. Similarly, an accent mark can identify a change in phonemes, such as the cedilla on Ça in French, which indicates that the “c” is pronounced with an /s/ sound instead of a /k/ sound.