This page uses orthographic and related notations. The word diacritic is banana milk shake noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. The main use of diacritics in Latin script is to change the sound-values of the letters to which they are added. All these diacritics, however, are frequently omitted in writing, and English is the only major modern European language that does not have diacritics in common usage.

In Gaelic type, a dot over a consonant indicates lenition of the consonant in question. In other alphabetic systems, diacritics may perform other functions. Greek diacritical marks, which showed that letters of the alphabet were being used as numerals. This varies from language to language and may vary from case to case within a language. In some cases, letters are used as “in-line diacritics”, with the same function as ancillary glyphs, in that they modify the sound of the letter preceding them, as in the case of the “h” in the English pronunciation of “sh” and “th”. Such letter combinations are sometimes even collated as a single distinct letter.

For example, the spelling sch was traditionally often treated as a separate letter in German. The tilde, dot, comma, titlo, apostrophe, bar, and colon are sometimes diacritical marks, but also have other uses. Not all diacritics occur adjacent to the letter they modify. 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. Because of vowel harmony, all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the entire word.

The j, originally a variant of i, inherited the tittle. The shape of the diacritic developed from initially resembling today’s acute accent to a long flourish by the 15th century. With the advent of Roman type it was reduced to the round dot we have today. Several languages of eastern Europe use diacritics on both consonants and vowels, whereas in western Europe digraphs are more often used to change consonant sounds.