Double low quotation mark „

In American English, quotes open with “ and close with ”. Many Central and Eastern European languages open low and close high instead:

Watch the closing mark. German and Czech close with “ (the mark Americans use to open), while Polish, Hungarian and Romanian close with ”. Mixing up this pair is the most common mistake when setting European text.

German books also use guillemets pointing inward, »…«, as an alternative style.

• Two commas (,,): a common shortcut in emails, but they are two separate characters with a gap, and spell-checkers and search tools treat them as commas.
• Single low quotation mark (‚): opens a quote within a quote in German (‚…‘). It looks like a comma but is a different character.
• Straight quote ("): the typewriter double quote. Fine in code, not in typeset text.
• Guillemets (« »): angled quotes used in French, Spanish, Russian and others, and reversed (» «) in German.

When you quote a German or Polish phrase inside an English sentence, use American quotation marks around it. Keep „ for text set entirely in the other language.

• Word: set the proofing language of the text to German, Polish or Hungarian, and AutoFormat converts typed straight quotes into that language’s pattern.
• HTML: mark up the passage with the right lang attribute and use the q element; browsers with language-aware quotes then pick the matching quotation marks for that language.
• Mac: Option+Shift+W types „ and Option+Shift+0 types the single ‚. The closing marks are Option+[ for “ and Option+Shift+[ for ”.
• LaTeX: with the babel package for German, \glqq and \grqq produce „ and “.