The adverb “only” may take tilde again. This is how the RAE has decided this Thursday, which until now established that this word it is not written with tilde even if it equals “only”. Now, the Academy has decided that it will be able to take it, just like the demonstrative pronouns “this, that and that”as well as its feminine and plural, when in the opinion of the writer there is a risk of ambiguity.

A change that, according to sources from the plenary session of the Academy of Language cited by Efe, been claimed for years by academic writers that they considered that the use of the tilde in these words should be “decriminalized”.

Until now, the RAE determined that the word “only”, both when it is an adverb and is equivalent to “only” and when it is an adjective, as well as the demonstratives “this, that and that” and their feminine and plural forms, whether they functioned as pronouns or as determiners, they should not have an accent.

Despite the fact that orthographic rules previously prescribed the use of tilde in the adverb “only” and the demonstrative pronouns to distinguish them, respectively, from the adjective “only” and the demonstrative determiners when both interpretations were possible in the same statement, it was considered that possible ambiguities could almost always be resolved by the context itself.

The general recommendation was not to mark these wordsalthough it was optional when its use entailed a risk of ambiguity, but it was not defined in whose judgment, according to the sources consulted by the aforementioned agency, which have highlighted that there were cases of exams and oppositions in which using it subtracted a grade because it used to depend on the criteria of the teacher or the examiner. The novelty lies, then, in that it becomes the discretion of the writer the text to mark or not these words.

A change before which the writer Arturo Perez-Reverte has transferred its satisfaction to Efe and has indicated that all the academics have agreed to introduce this formulation, since it does not destroy the initial formulation but allows a more reasonable use of the tilde in these cases, since it is the person who writes the text who decides whether or not to use it.