Transliteration
Several languages that are not written with the Roman alphabet are transliterated, or romanized, using diacritics. Examples:
- Arabic has several romanisations, depending on the type of the application, region, intended audience, country, etc. many of them extensively use diacritics, e.g., some methods use a dot for rendering emphatic consonants (ṣ, ṭ, ḍ, ẓ, ḥ). Macron is often used to render long vowels. š is often used for /ʃ/, ġ for /ɣ/.
- Chinese has several romanizations that use the umlaut, but only on u (ü). In Hanyu Pinyin, the four tones of Mandarin Chinese are denoted by the macron (first tone), acute (second tone), caron (third tone) and grave (fourth tone) diacritics. Example: ā, á, ǎ, à.
- Romanized Japanese (Romaji) occasionally uses macrons to mark long vowels. The Hepburn romanization system uses macrons to mark long vowels, and the Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki systems used a circumflex.
- Sanskrit, as well as many of its descendants, like Hindi and Bengali, uses a lossless transliteration system for representing words in the Roman alphabet. This includes several letters with diacritical markings, such as horizontal lines above vowels (ā, ī, ū), dots above and below consonants (ṛ, ḥ, ṃ, ṇ, ṣ, ṭ, ḍ) as well as a few others (ś, ñ).
Read more about this topic: Diacritic