diakritikker

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or character to modify its pronunciation, meaning, or to distinguish it from similar characters. These marks are used in many languages to represent sounds not found in the basic alphabet or to differentiate between homographs. The term "diacritic" comes from the Greek word *diakritikos*, meaning "distinguishing."

Common diacritics include the acute accent (é), grave accent (à), circumflex (â), umlaut or diaeresis (ä), tilde (ñ), and cedilla (ç). Each diacritic can indicate different phonetic changes depending on the language. For instance, in French, the acute accent on 'e' (é) often indicates a closed 'e' sound, while in Spanish, the tilde over 'n' (ñ) creates a distinct palatal nasal sound.

Diacritics are essential for accurate spelling and meaning in languages that employ them, such as French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and many others. Their presence or absence can fundamentally alter the pronunciation and even the meaning of a word. For example, the German word "schon" (already) and "schön" (beautiful) are distinguished solely by the umlaut on the 'o'.

In typography and computing, diacritics pose challenges for character encoding and display. Proper handling of diacritics is crucial for international communication, searching, and data processing to ensure texts are rendered correctly and consistently across different systems. The Unicode standard provides a comprehensive system for representing characters with diacritics.