Why do I get "double greater/less thans" instead of double quotes in Word?

I am using Word 2011 on my Lion iMac. Sometimes as I write, when I hit the "double-quote" key, I don't get double-quotes, but another symbol that looks like "double-less-thans" or "double-greater-thans" (see the word "gains" in the screen capture below). My work-around is to delete the unwanted symbols, use the "copy-formatting" command and copy the format from some other paragraph, and then add the double-quotes back.

Why am I getting these unwanted symbols? How do I stop them from coming back?

Solution 1:

This probably happens because Word uses language settings for a language that uses “chevrons” (double angle quotation marks) as quotation marks, such as French. By default, Word auto-corrects Ascii quotation marks (") to language-specific marks, e.g. to “smart” curly quotes for English. The fix is to change the language setting (click on the language indicator for this). It won’t change the quotes already entered, so you need to fix them separately.

By default, Word uses language guessing: it tries to infer the language of text from the text itself. It sometimes guesses wrong. I don’t see why this would have happened here, as the text looks like normal English. But maybe the language setting was originally e.g. French and language guessing was off?

It’s odd that Word uses «gains», because by French rules, the quotation marks should be separated from the word with fine spaces. The Windows versions of Word therefore insert normal spaces: « gains ». This isn’t quite correct, as the spaces should be fine, narrower, and maybe the Mac version therefore doesn’t introduce the spaces. Or maybe it is applying the rules of some language that uses chevrons without spaces.