Orthographic diacritics and multilingual computing

Abstract

Diacritics — marks above, through, or below letters — are used in many orthographies to remedy the shortcomings of the ordinary Latin alphabet. The author catalogues the various diacritics that are in use for spelling different languages, describing what they look like and what they are used for. He also analyses the problems of using accented letters in a multilingual computing environment, and discusses the extent to which these problems have been resolved, with particular reference to Unicode.