Nondiacriticized

Nondiacriticized is an adjective describing text that lacks diacritical marks or accent characters. Diacritics include acute, grave, circumflex, diaeresis, tilde, cedilla, caron, and similar marks used to indicate pronunciation, tone, or linguistic distinctions. The term is used in linguistics, typography, and computing to distinguish text that uses the basic Latin alphabet from text that includes diacritics. In practice, nondiacriticized text results from removing diacritics (diacritic stripping) or from original transcription that omits them. It is also described as ASCII-only or unaccented.

In computing, nondiacriticized text is produced by Unicode normalization or by transliteration rules. Common approaches include stripping combining diacritical marks after decomposing characters (for example, using Unicode normalization forms such as NFD or NFKD) or mapping letters with diacritics to their closest ASCII equivalents. This is used in search indexing, file naming, URL slug generation, and data interchange where strict character sets are required or where case-insensitive matching is desired.

Examples include transforming "fiancé" to "fiance," "naïve" to "naive," "über" to "uber," "Åland" to "Aland," and "cœur" to "coeur." Language-specific considerations include preserving essential information and avoiding ambiguity, since removing diacritics can obscure pronunciation or distinctions in proper nouns.

See also: diacritics, Unicode normalization, ASCII, transliteration, text normalization.