Diakrytyce

Diakrytyce, known in English as diacritics, are marks added to letters to modify their sound value or to distinguish otherwise identical forms. They are an integral part of many writing systems that use the Latin alphabet and occur in languages worldwide. Diacritics can indicate vowel length, tone, stress, nasalization, palatalization, or consonant modification, and they may also serve to distinguish homographs in a language.

Common types include the acute accent (as in á), the grave accent (à), and the circumflex (â), which often signal a change in vowel quality or length. The diaeresis or umlaut (ö, ü) marks vowel quality or separation of syllables. The tilde (ñ) and the cedilla (ç) modify pronunciation or enforce particular phonemes. The caron or háček (č, š, ž, ř, ě) alters consonants or vowels in several Slavic languages. Other marks such as the ring above (å), macron (ā), breve (ă), ogonek (ą), dot above (i, j variants), and dot below (ṁ) expand the range of phonetic distinctions. In some languages additional diacritics signal tonal patterns or tone groups, as in Vietnamese.

Digital text uses two mechanisms: precomposed characters in Unicode, where the diacritic is part of a single code point, and combining diacritical marks, where the base letter and the mark are separate code points. Normalization procedures ensure consistent representation. Diacritics impact orthography, literacy, sorting, and text processing; they pose considerations for font design, input methods, and linguistic analysis. In practice, diacritics are essential for accurate pronunciation, meaning, and identity in many languages, from everyday writing to scholarly work.