Umlaut

Ä äÖ öÜ ü

Vowel modification

Germanic umlaut {{Diacritical marks}}

In linguistics, the process of umlaut (from German um- "changed", "transformation" + Laut "sound") is a modification of a vowel which causes it to be pronounced more similarly to a vowel or semivowel in a following syllable. This process is found in many languages.

Related Topics:
Linguistics - Vowel - Semivowel

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The term umlaut was originally coined and is principally used in connection with the study of the Germanic languages. In umlaut, a back vowel is modified to the associated front vowel when the following syllable contains {{IPA|}}, {{IPA|}} or {{IPA|}} (the sound of English ). This process took place separately in the various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 AD, and affected all of the early languages except for Gothic.

Related Topics:
Germanic languages - Back vowel - Front vowel - Gothic

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Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.

Related Topics:
Indo-European - Ablaut

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Umlaut in English and German

Although umlaut itself has nothing to do with grammatical function, the resulting vowel changes often took on such a function. We can see this in the English word man; in ancient Germanic, the plural had the same vowel, but also a plural suffix -ir. The suffix caused fronting of the vowel, and when the suffix later disappeared, the mutated vowel remained as the only plural marker: men. In English, such umlaut-plurals are rare, but other examples are tooth/teeth and goose/geese; compare also long (adj)/length (n). Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but it should be remembered that many English words contain a vowel which has been mutated in this way, but which does not now have a parallel unmutated form; umlaut need not carry a grammatical function.

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(table adapted from Malmkjær 2002)

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In German, umlaut as a marker of the plural of nouns is a regular feature of the language, and although umlaut itself is no longer a productive force in German, new plurals of this type can be created by analogy. Likewise, umlaut marks the comparative of many adjectives. Because of the grammatical importance of such pairs, the German umlaut diacritic (see below) was developed, making the phenomenon very visible. The result in German is that the vowels , , and become , , and , and the diphthong becomes : Mann/Männer ("man/men"), lang/länger ("long/longer"), Haus/Häuser ("house/houses"). (On the phonetic realisation of these, see the article on German phonology.) However, German orthography is not entirely consistent in this. The adjective fertig ("finished"; originally "ready to go") contains an umlaut mutation, but it is spelled with e rather than ä as its relationship to Fahrt (journey) has for most speakers of the language been lost from sight. On the other hand, German spells Känguruh ("Kangaroo") with an , although the origins of this vowel have nothing to do with umlaut; this is an English loan-word, and the diacritic is being used in mimicry of the English grapheme-phoneme relationship.

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Umlaut in Germanic verbs

Two interesting examples of umlaut involve vowel distinctions in Germanic verbs. Often these are subsumed under the heading "ablaut" in descriptions of Germanic verbs, but their origin is distinct.

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The German word Rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut") is the slightly misleading term given to the vowel distinction between present and past tense forms of certain Germanic weak verbs. Examples in English are think/thought, bring/brought, tell/told, sell/sold. (These verbs have a dental -t or -d as a tense marker, therefore they are weak and the vowel change cannot be conditioned by ablaut.) The presence of umlaut is possibly more obvious in German denken/dachte ("think/thought"), especially if we remember that in German the letters and are usually phonetically equivalent. The Proto-Germaic verb would have been *þankjan; the /j/ caused umlaut in all the forms which had the suffix; subsequently the /j/ disappeared. The term "reverse umlaut" indicates that if, with traditional grammar, we take the infinitive and present tense as our starting point, there is an illusion of a vowel-shift towards the back of the mouth (so to speak, ?) in the past tense, but of course the historical development was simply umlaut in the present tense forms.

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A variety of umlaut occurs in the 2nd and 3rd person singular forms of the present tense of some Germanic strong verbs. For example German fangen ("to catch") has the present tense ich fange, du fängst, er fängt. Subsequent developments mean that this phenomenon does not always look like umlaut. For example geben ("give") has the present tense ich gebe, du gibst, er gibt, though the shift e?i would not be a normal result of umlaut in German. For all practical purposes this can be included in the ablaut tables (as used when teaching German as a second language, for example, or in Old English text books), but its origin is not ablaut.

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Umlaut in other languages

Parallel phenomena in other languages may also be termed umlaut, though there may be a tendency to use other terms such as i-mutation when the reference is not to Germanic. For example, the word "affection" is used for umlaut in the Celtic languages. Examples of the umlaut phenomenon can be found in other branches of the Indo-European language family (though as independent developments, since umlaut occurred after the break-up of Proto-Indo-European) and also in Semitic and many other non-IE languages.

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Umlaut as a broader term

Some people use the term umlaut more widely to include other kinds of sound change. Occasionally one hears the phrase a-umlaut for a-mutation, for example. However other terms are available for greater precision. See the general article on metaphony.

Related Topics:
A-mutation - Metaphony

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