Diacritic

Diacritic is a binary character property that marks a code point as functioning as a combining or modifying sign, such as an accent, cedilla, or umlaut, which alters the pronunciation or meaning of a base character without being an independent letter. It includes not only classic marks like acute, grave, and tilde, but also spacing clones, stroke modifiers, and certain punctuation-like symbols used in phonetic or orthographic systems. The property is distinct from “Combining_Mark” since it also covers non-combining characters, and it excludes letters that are inherently accented (like “é” as a precomposed unit). When set, it indicates the character is primarily diacritical in nature, useful for text normalization, sorting, and search, as well as for analyzing script composition, though the value is not absolute for every context, as some characters may function diacritically only in specific languages.