Thousands of Spanish names in California have been Americanized. Cañon Drive it's never to be found written "Cañón", and José is often written as Jose, with no accent. In an attempt to change that, Latino assemblyman Jose Medina recently introduced a bill aiming to overturn the ban on diacritical marks so that Spanish names can include accents and the distinctive letter ‘ñ’ in official documents.

“The State Registrar shall require the use of a diacritical mark on an English letter to be properly recorded, when applicable, on a certificate of live birth, fetal death, or death, and a marriage license,” says the bill. “The use of a diacritical mark on an English letter shall be deemed an acceptable entry on a certificate of live birth, fetal death, or death, and a marriage license by the State Registrar. For purposes of this section, a diacritical mark includes, but is not limited to, accents, tildes, graves, umlauts, and cedillas.”

The bill passed unanimously in its first round of voting by a California assembly committee with a Democrat majority. A similar bill introduced in 2014 did not get beyond this point after state agencies estimated it would cost $10 million to reprogram and upgrade their IT systems and searchable indexes.

If the bill is approved, it will allow children to be registered with names that include the Catalan cedilla (ç), acute and grave accents (é or è), umlauts (ö or ü) and tildes (ñ or ã). Names such as Chloë o Zoë, Benoît o Eça will all be officially recognized with all their marks – which is surely good news for singer Beyoncé.

As reported in El País.