diacriticomitting

Diacriticommitting is a neologism used to describe the intentional practice of preserving, adding, and enforcing diacritic marks in written text across transcription, transliteration, and data-processing workflows. It refers to the broader aim of maintaining phonemic distinctions and orthographic conventions that diacritics encode, rather than omitting them for simplicity or compatibility.

The term combines diacritic, the symbol or mark added to a letter to alter its sound or meaning, with committing, in the sense of committing to a chosen orthographic representation. It is sometimes described in discussions of digital humanities, typography, and language technology as a stance on data fidelity and user-facing readability in multilingual contexts.

In practice, diacriticommitting appears in several areas. In language pedagogy, it emphasizes teaching and using correct diacritics to reflect pronunciation and meaning. In natural language processing and corpus curation, it advocates diacritic-aware tokenization, retrieval, and normalization, including the use of Unicode combining characters and normalization forms (NFC, NFD). In OCR and transcription, it underlines the importance of reconstructing diacritics that may be lost during capture. In typography and user interfaces, it supports display and input systems that make diacritics visible and usable across platforms and languages.

Challenges include diacritic loss in data pipelines, inconsistent keyboard support, and search or indexing that treats diacritically distinct forms as equivalent. Proponents argue that diacriticommitting improves linguistic accuracy and user comprehension, while critics caution about usability and technical complexity in mixed-script environments. See also diacritics, diacritization, orthography, Unicode.