Changes

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

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

These are examples of common diacritics:

The following are Western European (Latin-1) diacritics:

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

* '''Áá, Éé, Íí, Óó,''' and '''Úú''' — An acute accent is a symbol placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Italian]].

* '''^''' - The circumflex is placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Afrikaans]].

* '''Àà, Èè, Ìì, Òò''', and '''Ùù''' — A grave accent is placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]], [[Italian]] and [[Vietnamese]].

* '''è''' - A grave accent is placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]], [[Italian]] and [[Vietnamese]].

* '''Ââ, Êê, Îî, Ôô,''' and '''Ûû''' — The circumflex is placed over a vowel in some languages, especially [[French]] and [[Afrikaans]].

* '''ü''' - An umlaut, represented by two dots above the vowel, is used in some languages, especially [[German]] and [[Afrikaans]] and Nordic languages like [[Swedish]] and [[Finnish]].

* '''Ää, Ëë, Ïï, Öö,''' and '''Üü''' — An umlaut, represented by two dots above the vowel, is used in some languages, especially [[German]] and [[Afrikaans]] and Nordic languages like [[Swedish]] and [[Finnish]].

* '''Çç''' — A cedilla is used in French.

Sounds unique to Eastern European languages were once written with two letter combination called "digraphs." Jan Hus proposed the use of diacritics in ''De Ortographia Bohemica'' (1412). Eight upper case characters with diacritics are included in International Morse Code: Ä, Á, Å, Ch (a Czech digraph), 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 was 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 standard, is still used in Western European typography.<ref>[http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf Controls and Latin-1 Supplement], Unicode, Inc.</ref> Unicode, implemented by the Windows operating system since 2000, includes a comprehensive collection of Nordic, Eastern European, and even Asian characters.

Sounds unique to Eastern European languages were once written with two letter combination called "digraphs." Jan Hus proposed the use of diacritics in ''De Ortographia Bohemica'' (1412). Eight upper case characters with diacritics are included in International Morse Code: Ä, Á, Å, Ch (a Czech digraph), 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 was 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 is a slightly revised version of this standard that is still in use.<ref>[http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf Controls and Latin-1 Supplement], Unicode, Inc.</ref> Unicode, implemented by the Windows operating system since 2000, includes a comprehensive collection of Nordic, Eastern European, and even Asian characters.

==Correct usage==

==Correct usage==