Diakritische

Diacritics, known in German as diakritische Zeichen, are marks added to letters to modify their pronunciation, distinguish meanings, or indicate prosody such as tone or stress. They occur in many languages that use the Latin alphabet and in several non-Latin scripts. Diacritics can affect how a word is pronounced, identify a distinct letter in an alphabet, or signal etymology and grammatical features.

Common examples include the acute accent (é), grave accent (è), and circumflex (ê), which often reflect vowel quality or stress. The diaeresis or umlaut (ë, ü) marks vowel separation or fronting. The tilde (ñ) and cedilla (ç) modify consonant sounds. Caron or háček (č, š, ž) signals different postalveolar sounds, while the ring (å) and macron (ā) indicate vowel length or quality. Other marks such as the breve (ă), ogonek (ą), and dot above (ż) serve language-specific purposes. Diacritics may also convey tone, as in Vietnamese, where multiple combining marks indicate phonation and pitch.

In digital text, diacritics pose encoding considerations. Unicode provides both precomposed characters (a single code point) and combining marks (base letter plus one or more diacritics). Normalization forms manage these representations to ensure consistent matching, sorting, and search. Environments limited to ASCII often substitute approximations, risking ambiguity or mispronunciation.

The practical significance of diacritics lies in pronunciation, disambiguation, and identity. They distinguish otherwise identical words (for example, el vs él in Spanish) and encode phonological or tonal information essential for correct interpretation. Diacritics are integral to many languages, influencing typography, education, and information retrieval, and they reflect a long historical tradition of orthographic refinement.