nondiacritical

Nondiacritical refers to letters or characters in an alphabet that do not use diacritical marks. Diacritical marks, also known as accents or diacritics, are small symbols added to a letter to modify its pronunciation, distinguish it from a similar letter, or indicate stress or tone. Examples of diacritical marks include the acute accent (é), the grave accent (è), the umlaut (ü), and the tilde (ñ).

In contrast, nondiacritical letters are the standard forms of the letters as they appear without any added marks. For instance, in the English alphabet, all letters are typically considered nondiacritical. However, some languages use diacritics extensively, and their absence in a text can significantly alter the meaning or render the text unreadable or ambiguous.

The concept of nondiacritical is primarily relevant in linguistics, typography, and computing. In linguistic analysis, it helps to differentiate between basic letter forms and those with modified sounds. In typography, it relates to the design and rendering of characters. In computing, it can be important for character encoding and searching, where nondiacritical versions of letters might be treated differently from their diacritical counterparts. For example, a search function might be configured to ignore diacritics, effectively treating "e" and "é" as the same character for search purposes, thus searching for nondiacritical equivalents. This process is often referred to as "nondiacriticization."