). French orthography uses the accent on three letters (, , and ). The is used in only one word, ("where"), to distinguish it from its homophone ("or"). The is used in only a small closed class of words, including , , and (homophones of , , and , respectively), and . The is used more broadly to represent the vowel , in positions where a plain would be pronounced as (schwa). Many verb conjugations contain regular alternations between and ; for example, the accent mark in the present tense verb distinguishes the vowel's pronunciation from the schwa in the infinitive, . Italian Occitan Ligurian also uses the grave accent to distinguish the sound , written , from the sound , written or . Disambiguation In several languages, the grave accent distinguishes both homophones and words that otherwise would be homographs: In Bulgarian and Macedonian, it distinguishes the conjunction ("and") from the short-form feminine possessive pronoun . In Catalan, it distinguishes homophone words such as ("my (f)") and ("hand"). In French the grave accent on the letters and has no effect on pronunciation and just distinguishes homonyms otherwise spelled the same, for example the preposition ("to/belonging to/towards") from the verb ("[he/she/it] has") as well as the adverb ("there") and the feminine definite article ; it is also used in the words ("already"), (preceded by or , and meaning "closer than" or "inferior to (a given value)"), the phrase ("hither and thither"; without the accents, it would literally mean "it and the") and its functional synonym . It is used on the letter only to distinguish ("where") and ("or"). is rarely used to distinguish homonyms except in / ("since/some"), / ("in/(thou) art"), and / ("near/the"). In Italian, it distinguishes, for example, the feminine article from the adverb ("there"). In Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk), the grave accent separates words that would otherwise be identical: (and) and (too). Popular usage, possibly because Norwegian rarely uses diacritics, often leads to a grave accent in place of an acute accent. In Romansh, it distinguishes (in the standard) ("and") from the verb form ("he/she/it is") and ("in") from ("they are"). It also marks distinctions of stress ( "already" vs. "violin") and of vowel quality ( "bed" vs. "marriage"). Length In Welsh, the accent denotes a short vowel sound in a word that would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound: "mug" versus "smoke". In