For the Canadiens, Whatever's in a Name Is on the Back Eric Bolte/Reuters Montreal had an N.H.L. linguistic first when it added diacriticals to name bars, like those of Jeremy Grégoire. The Montreal Canadiens" decision this season to include the accents in players" names on their uniforms was not born of cultural politics. It arose simply out of one man's desire to be accurate. "I like to write things the right way," said Pierre Gervais, the longtime equipment manager in charge of putting name bars on the Canadiens" uniforms. General Manager Marc Bergevin signed off on the idea, and voilà, linguistic sports history was made. Montreal is the first N.H.L. club to have a policy of rendering players" names accurately on their uniforms. The grave accent in Daniel Brière's surname is still the only diacritical mark on a Canadiens name bar, and he is out with a concussion sustained Oct. 19. Another player whose name includes a diacritical mark is Joonas Nättinen of the Hamilton Bulldogs, the Canadiens" affiliate in the American Hockey League. Jeremy Grégoire, who is in a junior league, was with the Canadiens in the preseason. "If Nättinen gets called up, I'll put the double-dot over the A," Gervais said. I'll try to do the right spelling, which should be done. The rancor over language that roiled Quebec society in the 1970s, "80s and "90s has largely subsided, so the first sightings of Brière's accent mark last month generated little reaction in Montreal beyond surprise and delight that the century-old Canadiens had taken the step. "It's a minor accomplishment," the French-language Web site 25Stanley.com stated, "but all the same, it's a landmark for a team whose history is amazing." Players in other sports have had diacritical marks on their uniforms. The Haitian-American wide receiver Pierre Garçon, for example, has had the cedilla on his name bar while he was with the Indianapolis Colts, and now with Washington. But there has long been a special sensitivity to the rendering of proper names in Montreal sports, if for no other reason than two languages are spoken in the city. Montreal is the only city in North America's major leagues for which English is not the primary language. The Alouettes of the Canadian Football League have "Montréal" printed on their jerseys, replete with the acute accent used in the French rendering of the city's name; baseball's Expos did the same from 1969 to 2004. When the Belarussian forward Andrei Kastsitsyn attended Canadiens training camp in 2004, the club honored his request to change the spelling to Kostitsyn. When the Russian defenseman Alexei Emelin joined the Canadiens in 2011, Montreal newspapers used the more accurate transliteration of his surname, Yemelin. The papers have since reverted to the N.H.L."s official spelling, without the Y. "We are definitely more sensitive to language in Montreal than people might be elsewhere in North America, though it's not just us," said the hockey historian Michel Vigneault, a lecturer at the Université du Québec à Montréal. "It could be about whether the Canadiens" captain makes the effort to try to speak French, or it could be about accent marks." Gervais said the accents were made possible by technology. Until recently, the strip of cloth for name bars was too shallow. "I would have had to sew the accent mark onto the uniform itself, above the name bar," said Gervais, who started working as a Canadiens equipment manager in 1987. Until a few years ago, we used to reuse the uniforms, so I couldn't do it. Now, he said, the name bars are taller, and machines can print any diacritical mark. All of that together, I was sitting in my office last summer and said to myself, You know, why not? Gervais said. So he will print players" names as they appear on the official roster. Does that include Eastern European names with diacritical marks on C's, S's, N's and R's? "Honestly, I didn't know last summer about all the accents on European names," Gervais said. "I just said, "Boom, let's do it." But if a Czech player writes down his name with all those accent marks, I'll include them.