diacritization

Diacritization is the process of adding diacritical marks to letters to convey information about pronunciation, tone, length, stress, or grammatical function. Diacritics are marks such as acute, grave, circumflex, tilde, diaeresis, macron, and dot above or below a letter. The practice appears in many writing systems, where diacritics may be integral to the canonical spelling or used selectively for transliteration, disambiguation, or phonetic guidance.

In Latin-script languages, diacritics often indicate vowel quality or stress. French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages use accents to alter phonetic value or distinguish homographs. Vietnamese marks indicate tones and vowel quality as a combined part of each syllable. In scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew, diacritics can provide short vowels, cantillation, or emphasis, especially in learners’ texts, religious editions, or poetry. Other languages employ diacritics to mark vowel length, nasalization, or tone, such as Māori with macrons to denote long vowels and Yoruba or other tonal languages with tone marks.

In computing and linguistics, diacritization intersects with encoding and text processing. Diacritics may be stored as precomposed characters or as combining marks in Unicode, and normalization can affect search, sorting, and rendering. Automatic diacritization is a task in natural language processing, including restoration of diacritics in languages where they are often omitted in everyday writing, and accurate rendering for OCR and speech recognition.

Diacritization has historical and pedagogical value, aiding pronunciation, literacy, and linguistic analysis, but it can also introduce complexity in data entry, typography, and information retrieval when diacritics are optional or inconsistently used.