Olá, Grüezi, Cześć, ¡Hola! – Hello! While you may or may not be multilingual, your company likely has customers whose names contain accented Latin characters such as ø, á, ñ, or ü.
A brief history of accented Latin characters
According to Omniglot, the online encyclopedia of writing systems and language, the modern Latin alphabet consists of 52 letters (upper and lower case) as well as various symbols, punctuation marks, and numerals. In addition to the basic Latin alphabet, many languages (such as French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Portuguese, and many others) supplement the Latin alphabet by adding accent marks to vowels and some consonants.
Latin accents, such as the tilde (ã), umlaut (ä), slash (ø), acute (á), grave (à), circumflex (â), and cedilla (ç), are used to:
- Change pronunciation
- Indicate emphasis in a sentence
- Indicate what to stress in a word
- Indicate pitch or intonation
- Indicate vowel length
- Visually distinguishing homophones
The problem with Latin characters
Latin characters are difficult to render properly in computer programs and APIs that do not support international characters. For example, a name such as Zoë Smith might be failed as “garbage” in a typical name validation tool simply because the service doesn’t understand the “ë” character. In fact, our very own name validation previously had the same issue. However, we recently rectify this character set issue in our own service with a new feature that now adds support for approximately 62 common Latin and international characters.
DOTS Name Validation now accepts the most common accented Latin characters. This Latin character set update allows more Spanish, French, Italian, and German names to be validated and “pass” our name validation service without being kicked back as a “garbage” name.
What does our International Name Validation update mean to you?
Our customers asked us to support accented Latin characters, and we’re excited to deliver!
Since the update, more names in your contact database such as Terje Lundbø, Carlos Fernández, Jason Castañeda, and Fritz Müller are now being processed and verified by DOTS Name Validation successfully. This added feature also supports our composite lead verification services including DOTS Lead Validation and DOTS Order Validation. If your database contains a variety of international names, give our name validation services a try for free and see how it works for you!
