Diacritic

Historically, English has used the diaeresis diacritic to indicate the correct pronunciation of ambiguous words, such as "coöperate", without which the letter sequence could be misinterpreted to be pronounced /ˈkuːpəreɪt/.

[a] In Latin-script alphabets in other languages, diacritics may distinguish between homonyms, such as the French là ("there") versus la ("the"), which are both pronounced /la/.

In the Wali language of Ghana, for example, an apostrophe indicates a change of vowel quality, but occurs at the beginning of the word, as in the dialects ’Bulengee and ’Dolimi.

In abugida scripts, like those used to write Hindi and Thai, diacritics indicate vowels, and may occur above, below, before, after, or around the consonant letter they modify.

The shape of the diacritic developed from initially resembling today's acute accent to a long flourish by the 15th century.

These diacritics are used in addition to the acute, grave, and circumflex accents and the diaeresis: (Cantillation marks do not generally render correctly; refer to Hebrew cantillation#Names and shapes of the ta'amim for a complete table together with instructions for how to maximize the possibility of viewing them in a web browser.)

The diacritics 〮 and 〯 , known as Bangjeom (방점; 傍點), were used to mark pitch accents in Hangul for Middle Korean.

Usually ⟨ä⟩ (a-umlaut) and ⟨ö⟩ (o-umlaut) [used in Swedish and Finnish] are sorted as equivalent to ⟨æ⟩ (ash) and ⟨ø⟩ (o-slash) [used in Danish and Norwegian].

However, when names are concerned (e.g. in phone books or in author catalogues in libraries), umlauts are often treated as combinations of the vowel with a suffixed ⟨e⟩; Austrian phone books now treat characters with umlauts as separate letters (immediately following the underlying vowel).

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), first published in 1963, encoded just 95 printable characters.

For historical reasons, almost all the letter-with-accent combinations used in European languages were given unique code points and these are called precomposed characters.

Unfortunately, even as of 2024, many applications and web browsers remain unable to operate the combining diacritic concept properly.

Exceptions are unassimilated foreign loanwords, including borrowings from French (and, increasingly, Spanish, like jalapeño and piñata); however, the diacritic is also sometimes omitted from such words.

In older practice (and even among some orthographically conservative modern writers), one may see examples such as élite, mêlée and rôle.

The New Yorker magazine is a major publication that continues to use the diaeresis in place of a hyphen for clarity and economy of space.

The acute and grave accents are occasionally used in poetry and lyrics: the acute to indicate stress overtly where it might be ambiguous (rébel vs. rebél) or nonstandard for metrical reasons (caléndar), the grave to indicate that an ordinarily silent or elided syllable is pronounced (warnèd, parlìament).

Examples: Possibly the greatest number of combining diacritics required to compose a valid character in any Unicode language is 8, for the "well-known grapheme cluster in Tibetan and Ranjana scripts" or HAKṢHMALAWARAYAṀ.

Some users have explored the limits of rendering in web browsers and other software by "decorating" words with excessive nonsensical diacritics per character to produce so-called Zalgo text.