diacritized

Diacritized refers to text that includes diacritics—marks added to letters to indicate pronunciation, tone, stress, length, or other linguistic features. The process of adding these marks is often called diacritization or diacritization, and the resulting text is described as diacritized. Diacritics can appear as combining marks or as precomposed characters in a given alphabet.

Diacritics encompass a wide range of symbols, including the acute, grave, and circumflex accents; the tilde and diaeresis/umlaut; the cedilla; the ring above; as well as the caron (háček), ogonek, and many language-specific marks. They may modify vowel quality, indicate stress, signal phonemic distinctions, mark nasalization, or convey tonal information in certain languages. Examples include á, è, ñ, ç, ö, ã, and ḥ, among others. Some scripts also use diacritics on consonants, not just vowels.

Many languages rely on diacritics for correct spelling and meaning. French uses accents to distinguish words (eg, é vs e), Spanish uses the tilde on n (ñ) and acute accents for stress, Vietnamese encodes tone with multiple diacritics on vowels, and Czech and Slovak employ háčka and other marks to denote distinct sounds. In Turkish, the dotless i and other diacritics differentiate letters with unique phonologies. In some cases, diacritics are essential orthographic features; in others, they aid pronunciation or disambiguation.

Computationally, diacritized text is supported by Unicode, which includes combining diacritics and precomposed characters. Normalization (NFC, NFD) affects rendering and comparison. Diacritics influence searching, sorting, and text processing; diacritics may be stripped for ASCII transliteration or diacritic-insensitive matching. Diacritized text thus intersects typography, linguistics, and information processing.