Changes

* [[Umlaut]] (or [[trema]]) ('''ü''') - An accent, represented by two dots above the vowel, used in some languages, especially [[German]] and [[Afrikaans]] and Nordic languages like [[Swedish]] and [[Finnish]].

* [[Umlaut]] (or [[trema]]) ('''ü''') - An accent, represented by two dots above the vowel, used in some languages, especially [[German]] and [[Afrikaans]] and Nordic languages like [[Swedish]] and [[Finnish]].

Eight characters with diacritics are included in International Morse Code: Ä, Á, Å, Ch, É, Ñ, Ö, and Ü. This system was developed by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and adopted as an international standard in 1865. Extended ASCII, an eight-bit encoding standard introduced in 1981 with the IBM PC, has 54 characters with diacritics. A slightly revised version of this character set is still in use as "Latin-1." Unicode UTF-16, included in Windows 2000, has many more characters with diacritics and has almost unlimited character set.

Eight characters with diacritics are included in International Morse Code: Ä, Á, Å, Ch, É, Ñ, Ö, and Ü. This system was developed by Friedrich Clemens Gerke in 1848 and adopted as an international standard in 1865. Extended ASCII, an eight-bit encoding standard introduced in 1981 with the IBM PC, has 37 characters with diacritics (both upper case and lower case). A slightly revised version of this character set is still in use as "Latin-1." Unicode UTF-16, included in Windows 2000, has many more characters with diacritics and has almost unlimited character set.

==Should you use it?==

==Should you use them?==

The major American style guides recommend that writers follow the spelling given by the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, with ''The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary'' considered as authoritative. This dictionary has sections on biographic and geographic names that address the question of which diacritics should be used in English-language writing. Generally speaking, better known names are spelled without diacritics while lesser known names are spelled in the manner of the original language. Diacritics are not normally used for sport figures or for Vietnamese names. Each case should be checked separately in an appropriate reference work.

The major American style guides recommend that writers follow the spelling given by the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, with ''The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary'' considered as authoritative. This dictionary has sections on biographic and geographic names that address the question of which diacritics should be used in English-language writing. Generally speaking, better known names are spelled without diacritics while lesser known names are spelled in the manner of the original language. Diacritics are not normally used for sport figures or for Vietnamese names. Each case should be checked separately in an appropriate reference work.