Changes

A '''diacritic''' is a mark near or through a character that chan ges its phonetic value or significance. For example, the word "résumé" has diacritics above the letter ''e''. Diacritics are more common in various European language than they are in English.

A '''diacritic''' is a mark near or through a character that changes its phonetic value or significance. For example, the word "résumé" has diacritics above the letter ''e''. Diacritics are more common in various European language than they are in English.

These are examples of common diacritics:

These are examples of common diacritics:

* [[Acute accent]] ('''é''') - The acute accent is a symbol placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Italian]].v

* [[Acute accent]] ('''é''') - The acute accent is a symbol placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Italian]].v

* [[Circumflex]] ('''^''') - An accent placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Afrikaans]].É

* [[Circumflex]] ('''^''') - An accent placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Afrikaans]].

* [[Grave accent]] ('''è''') - An accent placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]], [[Italian]] and [[Vietnamese]].

* [[Grave accent]] ('''è''') - An accent placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]], [[Italian]] and [[Vietnamese]].

* [[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 upper case characters with diacritics are included in International Morse Code: Ä, Á, Å, Ch, É, Ñ, Ö, and Ü. This system also includes the twenty six characters of the Latin alphabet, ten numerals, and punctuation. It 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). "Latin-1", a slightly revised version of this character set, is still in use. Unicode UTF-16, included in Windows 2000, has many more characters with diacritics as well as an almost unlimited character set.

Eight upper case characters with diacritics are included in International Morse Code: Ä, Á, Å, Ch, É, Ñ, Ö, and Ü. This system also includes the twenty six characters of the Latin alphabet, ten numerals, and punctuation. It 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). "Latin-1," a slightly revised version of this character set, is still in use. Unicode UTF-16, included in Windows 2000, has many more characters with diacritics as well as an almost unlimited character set.

==Should you use them?==

==Should you use them?==

Style guides recommend that a writer select a reference work and follow the spellings it gives. Various guides recommend ''The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary'' as an authority on American spelling. This dictionary has sections on biographic and geographic names. 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 sports figures or for Vietnamese names. These are just rules of thumb, so each case should be checked separately in an appropriate reference work.

Style guides recommend that a writer select a reference work and follow the spellings that it gives. Various guides recommend ''The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary'' as an authority on American spelling. This dictionary has sections on biographic and geographic names. 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 sports figures or for Vietnamese names. These are just rules of thumb, so each case should be checked separately in an appropriate reference work.

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size: 90%;"

{| class="wikitable" style="font-size: 90%;"