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 distinguish it from the Arabic diacritic "" (), representing the vowel , which is similarly comma-shaped. In Arabic texts, Western-styled comma () is used as a decimal point. Reversed comma () is used in Sindhi when written in Arabic script. It is different from the standard Arabic comma. Hebrew script is also written from right to left. However, Hebrew punctuation includes only a regular comma (). Dravidian languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam also use the punctuation mark in similar usage to that of European languages with similar spacing. In the common character encoding systems Unicode and ASCII,