Question mark
In the early 13th century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade, punctuation was rationalized by assigning Alcuin's stroke-over-dot specifically to interrogatives; by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark.
Question
In languages written in Latin, Cyrillic or certain other scripts, a question mark at the end of a sentence identifies questions in writing. (In Spanish an additional inverted mark is placed at the beginning: "¿Cómo está usted?" "How are you?") As with intonation, this feature is not restricted to sentences having the grammatical form of questions – it may also indicate a sentence's pragmatic function.