Umlaut

Ä äÖ öÜ ü

Diacritical mark

The word umlaut is also used to refer to the diacritical mark composed of two small dots placed over a vowel ( ¨ ) to indicate this phonological phenomenon in German, and in several other languages which have borrowed the symbol from German. The umlauts are ä, ö, and ü. This should be distinguished from diaeresis, a similar mark used to indicate a diphthong in other languages. The umlaut dots are very close to the letter's body in a well-designed font, while the diaeresis dots are a bit further above — in computer screen fonts the difference is usually not noticeable, but in printed material it is. In today's Germany, the ß character is often counted among umlauts as well, though this is purely a practical consideration - both umlauts and ß are characters present in German writing but not in English writing, both are not in ASCII, and thus they often cause the same kind of problems, especially in all kinds of digital text processing.

Related Topics:
Diacritic - ä - ö - ü - Diaeresis - ß - ASCII

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History

Originally, umlaut was denoted in written German by adding an e to the affected vowel, either after the vowel or, in small form, above it. (In medieval German manuscripts, other digraphs could also be written using superscripts: in bluome ("flower"), for example, the was frequently placed above the .) In blackletter handwriting as used in German manuscripts of the later Middle Ages, and also in many printed texts of the early modern period, the superscript still had a form which would be recognisable to us as an . However, in the forms of handwriting which emerged in the early modern period (of which Sütterlin is the latest and best known example), the letter had two strong vertical lines, and the superscript looked like two tiny strokes. Gradually these strokes were reduced to dots, and as early as the 16th century we find this handwritten convention being transferred sporadically to printed texts too.

Related Topics:
Digraphs - Blackletter - Sütterlin

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Printing conventions in German

When typing German, if umlaut letters are not available, the proper way is to replace them with the underlying vowel and a following . So, for example, "Schröder" becomes "Schroeder". As the pronunciation differs greatly between the normal letter and the umlaut, simply omitting the dots is considered incorrect and irritates native speakers. The result might often be a different word, and in fact sentences can be constructed where the meaning would change, for example "Der Hauptmann gab den Soldaten Stützen/Stutzen", in English: "The captain gave the soldiers supports/short rifles.". Another example of incorrect practice is referring to Düsseldorf (named after the river Düssel, a tributary of the Rhine) as Dusseldorf, which literally means dimwit village.

Related Topics:
Düsseldorf - Rhine

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Despite this, the umlauted letters are not considered part of the alphabet proper. When alphabetically sorting German words, the umlaut is treated like the underlying vowel; if two words differ only by an umlaut, the umlauted one comes second, for example:

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• Schon
• Schön
• Schonen

There's a second system in use, mostly for sorting names (colloquially called "telephone directory sorting"), which treats ü like ue, and so on. Austrian telephone directories insert ü after uz.

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In Switzerland, capital umlauts are sometimes printed as digraphs, in other words, , , , instead of , , . (See German alphabet for an elaboration.)

Related Topics:
Switzerland - Digraph - German alphabet

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Similar graphemes in other languages

Some languages have borrowed some of the forms of the letters Ä, Ö, or Ü, for example Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Karelian, the Sami languages, Slovak and Turkish. For example, Estonian alphabet has borrowed , and from German, Finnish has and , Slovak has and Turkish has and . These characters are not umlauts because they are not a result of the phonological process of umlaut, even if they denote similar sounds to the German ones. Consequently, they are considered independent graphemes, and may not be replaced with , , or as in German. In Estonian and Finnish, for example, these latter diphthongs have independent meanings. Even some Germanic languages such as Swedish treat them as independent letters. In collation, this means they have their own positions in the alphabet, for example at the end ("A–Ö", not "A–Z") as in Swedish and Finnish, which means that the dictionary order is different from German.

Related Topics:
Ä - Ö - Ü - Estonian - Finnish - Hungarian - Karelian - Sami languages - Slovak - Turkish - Swedish - Collation

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The Estonian, Finnish and Sami languages use and to denote {{IPA|}} and {{IPA|}}. Hungarian, on the other hand, has and . The Slovak language uses the letter to denote {{IPA|}} (or a bit archaic but still correct {{IPA|}}) — the sign is called dve bodky ("two dots"), and the full name of the letter ä is a s dvomi bodkami ("a with two dots"). Swedish has and , and there is similar alteration between {{IPA|}} and {{IPA|}} with /ä/.

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By analogy with umlaut, various scripts including the International Phonetic Alphabet place two dots above other letters. In Dutch, when the letters ij come together in handwriting, they may appear like a 'y' with two dots above it, and the analogy with umlaut has led to this occasionally being printed in this way: 'ÿ'. Jacaltec, a Mayan dialect, and Malagasy are the only languages to allow a pair of dots over the letter "n".

Related Topics:
International Phonetic Alphabet - Jacaltec - Maya - Malagasy

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For the symbol in French and Spanish which looks like Umlaut, see Diaeresis.

Related Topics:
French - Spanish - Diaeresis

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Use of the diacritic for special effects

The umlaut diacritic can be used in "sensational spellings", for example in advertising, or for other special effects.

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As the German short a is more open than the equivalent sound in English (/æ/), Germans sometimes use the diacritic ä to imitate the English sound in writing, giving an English "feel" to words used in advertising; in a McDonald's restaurant in Germany one can buy a "Big Mäc".

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Since the letter ü is very common in Turkish, its inappropriate use can make a text in another language look "turkified", a purely visual mimicry. Because of the large number of Turks living in Germany, this again is a phenomenon familiar in German. The Turkish-German satirist Osman Engin, for example, wrote a book entitled Dütschlünd, Dütschlünd übür üllüs - the opening line of the former German national anthem, but turkified!

Related Topics:
Osman Engin - German national anthem

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In the heavy metal scene, the umlaut diacritic can frequently be observed as a mere decoration (with no significance for the pronunciation) on the names of bands such as Motörhead; see the article heavy metal umlaut. An interestingly self-referential example is the Finnish group Ümlaut.

Related Topics:
Heavy metal - Motörhead - Heavy metal umlaut - Ümlaut

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Entering umlauts in HTML

In HTML umlauts can be entered with an &?uml; entity reference. All umlauts are part of all Latin versions of the ISO 8859 character sets and thus have the same codepoints in ISO-8859-1 (-2, -3, -4, -9, -10, -13, -14, -15, -16) and Unicode.

Related Topics:
HTML - ISO 8859 - ISO-8859-1 - -2 - -3 - -4 - -9 - -10 - -13 - -14 - -15 - -16 - Unicode

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In addition to the umlauts, some dotted vowels (as with the ï in Montjuïc) may be valid in different alphabets.

Related Topics:
Vowel - Montjuïc - Alphabet

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Entering umlauts via special key sequences

On Microsoft Windows keyboard layouts that do not have umlaut characters, these characters can be entered by pressing the left Alt key, and entering the full ANSI numeric code on the numeric keypad, provided that the compatible code page is used as a system code page. You can also use numbers from Code page 850; these lack a leading 0.

Related Topics:
Microsoft Windows - Keyboard layout - ANSI - Code page 850

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On a computer running MacOS umlauts can be entered be pressing option-u, followed by the vowel to have an umlaut above it.

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X-based systems with the Compose key can usually enter umlauted characters by typing Compose, " followed by the letter.

Related Topics:
X-based systems - Compose key

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