diacritic
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diacritic
A diacritic (or diacritical mark) is a mark added to a letter, usually to indicate a specific pronunciation of that letter.
Of the various languages using the Latin alphabet, English is one of the few that generally does not use diacritical marks. Those words that do contain them are typically foreign loanwords whose diacritics have been retained in English. The most common of these that appear in English are known as accents (either acute, as in café, or grave, as in vis-à-vis).
There are, however, a few diacritics that are used in native English words.