Serial comma The judge in the case said that 43 of the 50 U.S. states had mandated the use of a serial comma and that both chambers of the federal congress had warned against omitting it, in the words of the U.S. House Legislative Counsel's Manual on Drafting Style, "to prevent[] any misreading that the last item is part of the preceding one"; only 7 states "either do not require or expressly prohibited the use of the serial comma". In the following languages, the serial comma is not the norm and may go against punctuation rules: Serial comma In English language punctuation,
Comma the full stops are frequently discarded. 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, though usage may be somewhat different. For instance, in Standard German, subordinate clauses are always preceded by commas. Modern Greek uses the same Unicode comma for its "kómma" () and it is officially romanized as a Latin comma, but it has additional roles owing to its conflation with the former hypodiastole, a curved interpunct used to disambiguate