section_path: As used by various languages/Diacritics
section_name: Diacritics
paragraph_text: Diacritics
  
  A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ ä ⟩, ⟨ ö ⟩, ⟨ ü ⟩ or the Romanian characters ă, â, î, ș, ț. Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate the start of a new syllable, or distinguish between homographs such as the Dutch words een (pronounced) meaning "a" or "an", and één, (pronounced) meaning "one". As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent.
  
  English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary. Historically, in formal writing, a diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., "coöperative", "reëlect"), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. "co-operative", "re-elect").