diacriticremoved

Diacritic removal, in computing and linguistics, refers to transforming characters that carry diacritical marks into their base Latin letters without diacritics. It is often used to normalize text for searching, indexing, and data exchange. The operation is most commonly applied to Latin-script text, but many scripts have diacritics as well.

Typical approach is to decompose characters into base letters and combining diacritics (Unicode normalization form NFD or NFKD), then discard combining marks. Alternatively, a mapping table replaces specific accented letters with their unaccented equivalents (é → e, ü → u, ñ → n, ç → c). Some libraries implement more aggressive transliteration to expand ligatures (æ → ae, œ → oe).

Limitations: removing diacritics can alter pronunciation, meaning, or orthography. Some languages rely on diacritics to distinguish words or grammatical forms. Additionally, simple removal does not always recover the original character when data is lost; in languages with dotless i or Turkish i, naive removal can create errors. Care is needed when converting to ASCII or performing case-insensitive matching across languages.

Applications: text search and normalization; URL slugs and file-name generation; data deduplication and indexing; OCR post-processing and historical text digitization. In programming, diacritic stripping is a common preprocessing step before matching or sorting.