Understanding Diaereses: The Horizontal Line That Indicates a Hiatus

Diaereses (plural: diaereses) is a diacritic mark used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to indicate a hiatus or a break between two vowel sounds. It is represented by a horizontal line above the vowel.

For example, the word "naïve" might be written with a diaeresis as "nāïve" to show that there is a pause between the two vowels. This can be useful in languages where the vowels are pronounced together but have different meanings, such as in French, where the word "naïve" means "naive" but "nāïve" means "native".

Diaereses are not commonly used in English, but they are used in other languages, such as French and German, to indicate the correct pronunciation of words with complex vowel combinations.