diakritiska

Diacritics, or diacritical marks, are signs added to letters to alter their pronunciation, distinguish meaning, or indicate other linguistic features. They are used in many writing systems, especially those based on the Latin alphabet, to signal vowel quality, stress, length, tone, nasalization, or palatalization. Diacritics can appear above, below, or through a letter, and they may be single marks or combinations. Some letters are formed by precomposed characters, while others are created with combining marks in digital text.

Common examples include the acute accent (é), grave accent (è), and circumflex (â), which modify vowel sound; the tilde (ñ) and the diaeresis/umlaut (ä, ö, ü); the cedilla (ç); the caron/hacek (č, š); the ogonek (ą, ę); and the ring (å). Diacritics can also indicate special features such as tone in tonal languages, where marks on vowels convey pitch contours, as in Vietnamese. In addition to pronunciation, diacritics help distinguish homographs, as in cafe versus café or resume versus résumé, and they can influence alphabetical ordering and search behavior in computer systems.

In usage, diacritics span many languages and historical scripts. They are integral to orthography, literacy, and pedagogy. In computing, Unicode and other encoding standards provide mechanisms for representing diacritics, including combining marks, which supports accurate rendering, normalization, and text processing across platforms and languages.