diacritical marking (accents)

Hello Betty see ☞ How to use emoji, accents, and symbols on your Mac - "Press Control–Command–Space bar. The Character Viewer pop-up window appears"

https://support.apple.com/HT201586

and

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-emoji-and-symbols-on-mac-mchlp1560/10.14/mac/10.14

BettyBoopity wrote:

Holding down the letter doesn't show any choices, it just makes a lot of aaaaaaaaaa. Help? Thank you!

Try this:

open Terminal app and type

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool true

and then restart.

It also may depend upon where you are doing this. Some apps override standard Apple services. Entering a letter in the search bar of Firefox will not invoke that function but using it in TextEdit does.

Another common cause of this problem is having Webroot antivirus garbage on your machine. If you have that, get rid of it.