Diacriticless

Diacriticless is an adjective used to describe text that contains no diacritics—accented or modified signs such as acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, umlaut, cedilla, or hooks. It is often applied to Latin-script writing when diacritics are omitted for simplicity, compatibility, or stylistic reasons.

In computing and information processing, diacriticless text is typically produced by removing combining diacritical marks or by transliterating characters to ASCII. Techniques include Unicode normalization and the removal of combining marks, or mapping characters with diacritics to base letters. Diacriticless strings are commonly used in URLs, file names, search indexing, and other environments that favor ASCII-only input or broad interoperation across systems and languages.

Linguistic and typographic considerations are central to the concept. Diacritics convey phonetic details and can distinguish meaning or grammatical functions in many languages. Removing them can introduce ambiguity or alter interpretation. Examples include café becoming cafe, naïve becoming naive, résumé becoming resume, and façade becoming facade. In Turkish, the distinction between dotted and dotless i demonstrates how diacritics and related marks can have system-wide effects on pronunciation and meaning.

Applications and limitations: diacriticless forms are practical in domains with technical constraints or when cross-language compatibility is required. However, they may reduce readability for readers familiar with the original orthography and can complicate tasks that depend on precise linguistic information. In transliteration and indexing, multiple diacritic variants may be maintained to balance usability with fidelity.