Diakryty

Diakryty, or diacritics, are marks added to letters to modify their pronunciation, tone, or meaning. They occur in many writing systems and are used to distinguish otherwise identical letters or to indicate phonetic features not captured by the base alphabet. In Latin-script languages they are common and include accents, cedillas, umlauts, and hooks. Some diacritics are mandatory in a language’s standard orthography, while others appear in loanwords and proper names.

Common types include acute (á), grave (à), circumflex (â), and tilde (ã); umlaut or diaeresis (ä, ö, ü); ring (å); cedilla (ç); caron or hacek (č, š); breve (ă); macron (ā); ogonek (ą). In Vietnamese, diacritics mark tones and vowel quality, producing many distinct syllables with a relatively small set of base letters.

Diacritics can signal pronunciation differences, distinguish homographs, or indicate grammatical features such as stress location. They also encode languages’ phonemic inventories and historical developments, contributing to readability and meaning.

In digital text, diacritics may be represented as single precomposed characters or as a base letter plus one or more combining marks. Unicode supports both forms, and normalization processes (NFC, NFD, NFKC, NFKD) manage their equivalence and representation.

The presence and design of diacritics influence typography, font coverage, and input methods. Proper rendering requires fonts that include the necessary glyphs and keyboards or input methods that allow efficient entry for users in different languages.