diakrieten

Diakrieten, in English diacritics, are marks added to letters to indicate a modified sound, tone or meaning. They are used in many languages and orthographies. In Dutch contexts the term diakrieten is used for these marks, which can appear above, below or through letters.

Common diacritic marks include the acute accent (´) and grave accent (`), the circumflex (ˆ), the tilde (~), and the diaeresis or umlaut (¨). Other frequent signs are the cedilla (¸), the ring above (˚), the macron (¯) and the breve (˘). Diacritics may modify vowels or consonants and may serve different functions in different languages. Examples: é and è in French, ê in French or Portuguese, ñ in Spanish, ç in French or Portuguese, å in Scandinavian languages, č and š in Czech and Slavic languages, ã in Portuguese or nasalized vowels in other languages, ä in German, as well as Romanian ă and the letters ș and ț.

Functions include signaling pronunciation, vowel quality, length or stress, and distinguishing words that would otherwise be homographs (for example résumé vs resume). In tonal languages such as Vietnamese, tone marks are diacritics applied to vowels to represent pitch. Diacritics can also influence reading rhythm and meaning in certain scripts, and they help preserve pronunciation information in written text.

In digital text, diacritics are represented as single precomposed characters or as combining marks in Unicode. Normalization (such as NFC and NFD) affects how strings are compared, searched or sorted. Input methods and fonts must support the intended diacritics to ensure correct rendering and accessibility, especially for minority languages.