Diacritic - Non-alphabetic Scripts

Non-alphabetic Scripts

Some non-alphabetic scripts also employ symbols that function essentially as diacritics.

• Non-pure abjads (such as Hebrew and Arabic script) and abugidas use diacritics for denoting vowels. Hebrew and Arabic also indicate consonant doubling and change with diacritics; Hebrew and Devanagari use them for foreign sounds. Devanagari and related abugidas also use a diacritical mark called a virama to mark the absence of a vowel. In addition, Devanagari uses the moon-dot chandrabindu ( ँ ).
• The Japanese hiragana and katakana syllabaries use the dakuten (◌゛) and handakuten (◌゜) (in Japanese: 濁点 and 半濁点) symbols, also known as nigori (濁) or ten-ten (点々) and maru (丸), to indicate voiced consonants or other phonetic changes.
• Emoticons are commonly created with diacritic symbols, especially Japanese emoticons on popular imageboards.