Americanist notation

Diacritics are more widely used in Americanist notation than in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which seeks to use as few diacritics as possible for phonemic distinctions, retaining them primarily for the dental–alveolar distinction. Americanist notation relies on diacritics to distinguish multiple distinctions that are phonemic in the languages it transcribes. On the other hand, Americanist notation uses single letters for most coronal affricates, whereas the IPA generally requires digraphs. Otherwise Americanist notation has grown increasingly similar to IPA, and has abandoned many of the more obscure letters it once employed.