In Portuguese, the grave accent indicates the fusion of the feminine definite article "a" with the preposition "a" (required by several verbs can be equivalent, for instance, of "to"). In Scottish Gaelic, it denotes a long vowel. In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone. In Italian, it marks final stress, as in virtù ("virtue") or città ("city") or as in è ("it is"). In Welsh, the accent is used to denote a short vowel sound in a word which would otherwise be pronounced with a long vowel sound, for example mẁg ("a mug") versus mwg ("smoke"). The letter a is the only one that takes the grave accent but not the acute. In Catalan, the grave accent is used to mark both the stress and the distinct quality of certain stressed vowels, such as è versus é, or such as ò versus ó. On u it is used only to distinguish où ("where") and ou ("or"). On a it distinguishes the preposition à ("to") and the verb a (present tense of avoir), as well as distinguishing là ("there") and the feminine definite article la it is also used in the word déjà and the phrase çà et là.
On the letters a and u it is used only as a grammatical mark that has no effect on pronunciation. On the letter e it marks the distinct quality of the vowel: è, and e. In French, the grave accent has two uses. It is used in the traditional polytonic orthography, but the monotonic orthography used for Modern Greek has replaced it with an acute accent. In Greek the grave accent occurs only on the last syllable of a word, in cases where the normal high tone (indicated by an acute accent) was lowered in Ancient Greek because of a following word in the same sentence.