Umlauns

Umlauns, more commonly called umlauts in English, are diacritical marks consisting of two dots placed over vowels in certain Germanic languages. In modern German, the letters ä, ö, and ü are treated as distinct letters with their own place in the alphabet, following a, o, and u.

The term umlaut refers to a historical phonological process in which a vowel changes its quality under the influence of a following sound. The diacritic marks originated in medieval manuscripts, where a small e was written above a letter to indicate the change; over time this annotation evolved into the two-dot diacritic we now associate with umlauts.

In German orthography, umlauts indicate a vowel shift and are used to distinguish words with different meanings. They appear in common words such as schön (beautiful) and müde (tired). When umlauts cannot be printed, the vowels are often written as ae, oe, or ue to preserve pronunciation and meaning. In many contexts, umlauted forms are considered separate letters and are alphabetically ordered after the corresponding base vowels.

Encoding and typography for umlauts are well established in modern computing. In Unicode, the characters are U+00E4 ä, U+00F6 ö, U+00FC ü, with uppercase forms U+00C4 Ä, U+00D6 Ö, U+00DC Ü. HTML represents them as ä, ö, ü (or numeric entities like ä). In TeX/LaTeX, umlauts are produced with commands such as \"{a}, \"{o}, and \"{u}.

Umlauts also appear in other languages and contexts where diaeresis or trema marks indicate vowel separation rather than umlaut-induced change. See also umlaut (linguistics).