I saw the surname Œwi¹tkowski written and the superscript one character in the middle of it confused me. A quick google revealed that this is not a typo as there are lots of instances of it, including academic papers (I checked that the superscript number did not simply indicate a footnote in these cases).
Is this actually a thing, and if so, how do I pronounce it and what purpose does it serve?
Update:I didn't think that you would have put numbers in the names, but I was somewhat confused!
I thought that a font issue might be the case at first too, but I directly copied the character and found that it is the ascii character 185 (Superscript One), whereas the diacritical characters you gave as examples all have their own codes, e.g. ą - 105 (Small letter A With Ogonek)
ł - 142 (Small Letter L With Stroke)
It turns out that the name in question was Świątkowski but for some reason sone fonts seem to use the wrong unicode values to display Ś and ą.
Thanks for the clarification though!
Answers & Comments
Verified answer
In Poland we don't put numbers in the names. Probably is something wrong with font - when font don't contains polish diacritical characters (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż), they are replaced by some strange charakters like "Œ" or "¹". I apologize for my English, but I haven't spoken for years...
There are more sounds in Polish than there are letters in the standard Latin alphabet so Polish has letters which carry accent marks to distinguish the sounds. Some fonts and some programs do not accommodate these marks and use superscripts to represent the accent marks. These superscripts seem to appear in pdf files especially.
As far as pronouncing them is concerned, this is a complex matter and cannot really be dealt with here. Try googling Polish pronunciation and see what you get.