Punctuation reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian, quotes would appear as: (in French, each "double punctuation", as the guillemet, requires a non-breaking space; in Russian it does not). In French of France, the signs : ; ? and ! are always preceded by a thin unbreakable space. In Canada, this is only the case for :. In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point , known as the (). In Georgian, three dots, , were
Punctuation of English "British" (typically used in the UK, Ireland, and most of the Commonwealth of Nations) and "American" (also common in Canada and places with a strong American influence on local English, as in the Philippines). These two styles differ mainly in the way in which they handle quotation marks with adjacent punctuation, and the use or omission of the full point (period) with contraction abbreviations. The terms "open" and "closed punctuation" have been applied to minimizing versus comprehensively including punctuation, respectively, aside from any dialectal trends. Closed punctuation is used in scholarly, literary, general business, and "everyday" writing. Open style dominates