Dediacritized

Dediacritized is an adjective describing text from which diacritical marks—such as accents, tildes, diaeresis, umlauts, cedillas, and other diacritics—have been removed. The result is base letters without their distinguishing marks, often referred to as ASCII or unaccented equivalents. The term combines de- (remove) with diacritic, and is used in linguistics, data processing, and digital typography to indicate the lack of diacritics in a given form.

In digital processing, dediacritization is typically achieved through Unicode normalization and diacritic-stripping algorithms. A common approach decomposes characters into a base letter plus combining diacritical marks (for example, café → cafe) and then discards the combining marks. Some workflows map to ASCII using transliteration rules (cafe, naïve → naive, São → Sao). Challenges arise because some languages rely on diacritics to distinguish meanings or pronunciations, and not all characters have unambiguous base-letter equivalents (for example, Turkish i/İ or Scandinavian ø).

Applications include search and indexing, where diacritics can impede matching, data migration and interoperability between systems with limited character support, and user interfaces that require plain-letter input. Dediacritization can improve compatibility and consistency but may obscure orthographic information and alter interpretation. Contextual use often pairs dediacritized forms with their diacritized originals to balance searchability and readability.