Unicode Explained

Unified diacritics

Similar-looking diacritic marks used in different languages and with different

meanings have generally been unified, even across scripts. Thus, the acute accent

used in French (e.g., on the “e” letters in “bébé”) is coded as the same as the acute

accent used in Polish (e.g., on the “n” letter in “Gdańsk”), even though traditional

typography for the languages uses rather different shape for the acute. The acute

accent is even unified with the Greek tonos mark (e.g., on first letter in “ώρα”),

even though it is commonly called tonos and not acute and even though its tradi-

tional shape is different from both French and Polish style. Often you do not see

differences in the shapes of a diacritic because typically each font has a uniform

design for a diacritic. However, a diacritic on a Latin letter often looks different

from the same diacritic on a non-Latin letter.

The unification applies to the diacritic as a combining mark and as a spacing char-

acter (such as acute accent U+00B4, ´) as well as any precomposed letters con-

taining the diacritic (e.g., é as used in French is coded as the same character as é

used in Hungarian).

Unification prevented by mapping considerations

Some capital letters have not been unified with each other despite similar or iden-

tical appearance, if the corresponding lowercase letters differ. For example, Latin

capital letter eth Ð and Latin ...