Latin Extended-A

Latin Extended-A is a Unicode block. The block has characters of letters with diacritics. This block was named European Latin in the first version.
They are used by languages "other than English". The symbols usually show a change in sound, but in some cases (circumflex in French) they signal a (historic) change in spelling. The general purpose of diacritics is disambiguation of sounds. This reflects the fact that the alphabet has many fewer letters than sounds.