Why is perché sometimes written perchè instead of perché?

Question

If using a grave accent as opposed to an acute accent on top of letters e and o in Italian is used to denote a difference in pronunciation when these appear on the last syllable of the word, and such syllable happens to be stressed, with è being an open e and é a closed e, then why is the Italian word perché sometimes written as perchè across the Internet instead of as perché?

After all, I've always heard the last vowel of this word being pronounced as a closed e. Could the reason for this orthographic rule be due to differences in regional pronunciations, or is there some other reason?

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UPDATE:

In response to a comment in one of the answers given below, his is an image of a magazine for kids that was popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, perhaps even later (not sure if it still exists, haven't checked!). Anyways, it illustrates two different spellings of one particular word, one using the grave accent, and the other using the acute accent, on the very same place (and this is not a misprint, this is a sample representative of thousands of magazines each of whose cover page is similar): PIÙ and Piú. Of course, in the case of 'u' there is only way to pronounce this vowel in Italian; there is no distinction made between an open pronunciation and a closed pronunciation as is the case with the letters e and o, so perhaps this does not matter much here.

(SOURCE: Link to the page where I downloaded this image)

Answer 1

There's more than one reason for that.

The structure of the Italian keyboard

I believe that the major reason has to be researched in the Italian keyboard: indeed, the key for è and é is the same. If it is pressed without any other keys, it outputs "è", while if it's used in combination with "Maiusc", it outputs "é".
My guess is that many people simply forget to press "Maiusc", they're too lazy to do that or they don't know that doing so will output the "e" with an other accent.

Lack of knowledge of the difference

There are plenty of Italians that simply don't know the difference between the two accents, hence they tend to always use the grave one.
This is mostly caused by the education in primary school: indeed, children are often taught the existance of just one, generic accent.

Belief that the difference between the two accents is irrelevant

Italian mother-tongues often don't need to distinguish between the two accents in order to spell a word (relatively) correctly, so they might think that the difference between them is so minimal that it's not worth distinguishing them.

Answer 2

Historical note. Until about the '50s (I do not have a precise date) in Italian books some accents were written "the other way around", i.e. using the grave accents where one would use the acute one today and the other way around. "Perché" was one of these words.

For example, have a look at the following page of this novel from 1902, third paragraph:

[…] Lo avevo detto io che piangevi! Perchè piangi?

Answer 3

IMO it's because 99% (my estimate) of Italians with an education level below university - and at least 50% of Italians with a non-language-related university education - have never, ever heard of this distinction, leave alone being taught about it in school. If one has access to a number of Italians with the above mentioned education, he/she should definitely try asking them; I'm very confident that would confirm my estimate. I personally became aware of this difference only a few years ago and by accident.

I'm also under the impression that - except in Italian language-related studies - no teacher would correct "perchè" or even perceive it as a mistake and a teacher who would correct that would likely be considered pedantic.

Answer 4

There are four issues at hand:

• è stands for /ɛ/, é stands for /e/; in Middle and Southern Italy "perché" is pronounced with /e/, while in Northern Italy it's pronounced with /ɛ/; the official accent is acute because Italian is modeled upon the dialect of Florence, which uses the closed variant. This means that children in the North have a hard time learning that they have to use the acute accent, because according to how they pronounce it they should use the grave accent (in Italian, letters correspond to the actual sound, more or less; much different from English); it may be that at least a part of the faulty spellers comes from this.
• typing the acute accent is a pain on keyboards (particularly so when you need capital letters), as it was said in other answers: so most people will just use "è"
• printing houses have long disagreed on which accent to use: there are some important ones that nowadays are still using the acute accent for "i" and "u" (refer to Luca Serianni, Grammatica italiana, chapter 1, paragraph 179); this is actually the "correct" way, because "i" and "u" are both closed vowels: the acute accent is used with closed vowels, the grave one with open vowels; but for reasons I don't know the "incorrect" way has become mainstream.

Answer 5

Giacomo Leopardi, the esteemed poet and philologist, wrote perchè (and nè) in his manuscripts, and scholarly editions (e.g., Peruzzi) reprint this accordingly. He was from Recanati, in the Marches; but he lived in Florence and Naples as well, and was one of the leading language scholars of his time. Some critical editions modernize his spelling to perché, since that is obviously the current norm. Yet there is zero reason to blame keyboards or to call people lazy over this issue: such regional variants belong to the legacy of the Italian language; which like every other language on earth, enjoys its share of lovely irregularities.

Answer 6

I'm Italian and I can say that every Italian don't pay attention to the slope of the accent. What you really should care about is to put it on the final syllable if needed, otherwise simply omit it. Anyway in Italian, on the final syllables the slope of the accent is almost always "é", that is on downhill, while in other languages ​​like French it can also be uphill like "è". I hope this helps