: While I generally agree with "don't worry if the reader can pronounce a word or not", I'd like to point out that having a letter that's not available on the "standard" keyboard makes a bigger

While I generally agree with "don't worry if the reader can pronounce a word or not", I'd like to point out that having a letter that's not available on the "standard" keyboard makes a bigger difference than your typical hard-to-spell name.

There was a Siobhan in my classes in middle school, and while I wouldn't be surprised if her name was actually SiobhÃ¡n, I never saw it spelled that way. This could have been an intentional decision by her or her parents, or it could have been related to the fact that everything was being pulled from computer systems which were... let's say out of date. Either way, class attendance and seating charts all listed her with a standard "a", no accent, and as a middle school student who had never known any other SiobhÃ¡ns, I never questioned it. Did she put the accent on when writing her own name? Maybe - I wasn't close enough to her to know.

So while I would never bat an eye at a character named SiobhÃ¡n in Ireland or a fantasy setting, even while I was ten years old, if your setting is an American school system, there may be additional nuances which you can consider (and completely ignore, if you so choose). If a teacher writes it on the board, they may leave off the accent because they're copying the name from their roster; a substitute may mispronounce it (let's be honest, subs mispronounce everything). Depending on how close she is to the point-of-view characters, it wouldn't be surprising if they knew how to pronounce her name, but not how to spell it. They may legitimately think it's spelled Siobhan, and if it's not a third person omniscient narrator, it may make more sense not to give it the accent unless/until she specifically pointed it out, or they saw her write it down and wondered why she put a weird apostrophe over the "a".

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