Comma - in Other Languages

In Other Languages

Punctuation has been added to many languages which originally developed without it, including a number of different comma forms.

European languages like German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese use the same comma as English with similar spacing.

Japanese punctuation commonly uses the '、' (tōten, 読点, U+3001 IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA) in native text and full-width comma '，' (U+FF0C FULLWIDTH COMMA) when mixing Japanese and Latin alphabet characters.

Chinese punctuation normally uses '，' (U+FF0C FULLWIDTH COMMA) but has the "enumeration comma" '、' (simplified Chinese: 顿号; traditional Chinese: 頓號; pinyin: dùnhào; literally "pause mark", U+3001 IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA) for lists. The comma is used to join together clauses that deal with a certain topic or line of thinking. As such, what would appear to an English speaker to be a comma splice is very commonly seen in Chinese writing. Often, the entirety of a long paragraph can consist of clauses joined by commas, with the sole period coming only at the end. Unlike in English, a comma is allowed between a subject and its predicate.

Arabic, Urdu, and Persian languages — written from right to left — use a reversed comma '،' (U+060C ARABIC COMMA) unlike other right-to-left languages like Hebrew.

Korean punctuation uses both commas and interpuncts for lists.