+1 my current workaround is to add words without diacritics at the end of the file name, can you imagine having all your notes named “Idées idees”, “Opération operation”? Please make this a priority. The thread was opened THREE YEARS ago and this should be pretty straightforward to implement!
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+1
Current workaround:
I am french so many of my note would have french accentuated characters is the title and content. For now my workaround which work for titles only is to make use of new properties feature and to create aliases for my notes without accents. This is time consuming and not relevant in a workflow but it works for my use case.
Example:
Title: Bioénergies
Alias: Bioenergies
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Just in case, an easier work around instead of putting them on the title is to use aliases.
For example in a note about “garantias” y add the alias “garantia”
That way you don’t ruin your titles, it’s still extremely tedious because when I want to cite the page it will usually use the invorrect version without the “á”, but it’s still better than putting on title
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It’s absurd and a shame for a notes app to not have implemented something as basic as search not ignoring diacritical characters. It’s the minimum of the minimum.
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This is THE i18n issue with Obsidian… for those of us that use other languages it looks like a bug!
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This is crucial, especially considering that certain languages have official variants of the same word with varying diacritics or none at all. Take “Île” in French as an example.
Additionally, I’ve submitted a related feature request highlighting a similar challenge with plural forms.
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The lack of this diacritic insensitive makes Obsidian very hard to use in multilingual environments.
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It certainly seems like a BUG, because it’s incredible that in plain 2024 a text focused app doesn’t have this expected feature. I still can’t understand why doesn’t this get more attention to the dev team.
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I do a lot of study on ancient languages, this feature would be invaluable.
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+1 to add this feature, searching without accents would help a lot
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+1 for this.
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Still waiting for this. I feel like it is a lack of inclusivity
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I found this page again while looking for another question.
Just wanted to confirm: Omnisearch is the way to go for all of us “international users” (meaning non-English speakers, also known as “most of the world” 
.) It can be configured to ignore diacritics, and it works as expected (so searching for “idee” will find “idée.md”.)
It even has some other very cool features. It requires a bit of setting up, including replacing hot keys, but once that is done it just works. Highly recommended.
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Not sure about that. Apparently 20% of the world speaks English. And most of the world doesn’t use the roman alphabet, which is where diacritics are modifiers.
First of all, I think yours is a very unnecessary reply. It adds nothing to the main discussion, and can be interpreted as, again, contempt against “diacritics users”…
Having said that, it seems to be also wrong, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:
The Latin alphabet is the most widely used script, with nearly 70 percent of the world’s population employing it.
Of course, how many of those actually use diacritics I don’t know… I would say, the whole of Latin America, most of western continental Europe (and many eastern European countries too, such as Romania, Poland), some Asian languages (at least Filipino, from the top of my mind.)
Apparently 20% of the world speaks English
Yeah, about that: this is the full paragraph where I think this information you mentioned was quoted from:
Approximately 20% of the world’s population speaks English, with around 400 million people speaking it natively and an additional 1.5 billion who speak it as their second or foreign language.
So 20% (i.e. 1.9 billion people), for this discussion, is a very inflated value, since most of this people do not speak English natively - meaning it’s not their primary nor their only language.
TL;DR I do not know how many people use diacritics in the world, but I can say it’s a lot. Probably more than native English speakers, and probably, yes, most of the world. Is it enough to consider this an important feature? We’ll see.
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I refer you to your comment:
which seems entirely unnecessary
8% world population
Europe total only 9%
“Most Filipinos (and Philippine news journals) write Tagalog without using any diacritic at all . However, pieces of Tagalog writing which use diacritics can occasionally be found in some religious journals, old books, and others. This case is where a word is stressed in the last or end syllable.”
I don’t think I’m wrong.
Over 50% of the world’s population is in Asia. Most of those using the Latin alphabet will do so in English.
idk. The numbers that article relies on are wrong, and underestimates the number of native English speakers (there’s nearly their 400m in North America alone). It doesn’t matter. The point is that claiming a spurious superiority by being “international” or “most of the world” is not the way to support a case. Especially when diacritic users are not most of the world.
I have no contempt for diacritic users: I sometimes use them myself. Just as I don’t always use the Latin alphabet.
@Dor please back down. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, there is no reason to make any of these arguments. Any further arguing in this thread will simply be flagged and removed. The previous replies may still be.
@rsenna, you are (a bit) newer here, so I’ll guide you to the Code of Conduct, “Encouraged Behaviors”, which includes “step away when heated”. You are free to flag posts you think are off-topic or inappropriate. Community code of conduct - Obsidian Help
The feature request is tagged “valuable” and “i18n”. No one needs to defend whether this is a valuable feature request. It is.
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Hi, being able to search regardless of special characters is critical for Hebrew also (all other searches i used ignore the vowel characters). So + 1 for this option
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Well, I didn’t know about this issue until now. I don’t know how many searches missed some of the results because of accents, but +1
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I want to add that cyrillic script also has diacritics and suffers from this issue as well. For example cyrillic letter “ё” often is written as “е” (they are not the same letters as latin, at least for computers). There can be other examples that I don’t know about, because there are many languages that use different versions of cyrillic.
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