Why does Lithuanian use diacritical marks in its writing system?

The Lithuanian alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet and utilizes diacritical marks to maintain a phonetic writing system. Because the standard Latin script lacks characters to represent every sound found in the Lithuanian language, these marks are necessary to accurately denote specific phonetic units.12

In linguistic literature, these diacritics serve to distinguish between different tones and stresses:
* Acute accent: Used to indicate falling tones.1
* Tilde: Used to indicate rising tones.1
* Grave accent: Used to indicate short, stressed vowels.1

By employing these marks, the language achieves greater specificity in its written form, allowing for a precise representation of the language's phonology that would otherwise be ambiguous or impossible to convey using only the basic Latin alphabet.2