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
In German orthography, umlauts indicate a vowel shift and are used to distinguish words with different meanings.
Encoding and typography for umlauts are well established in modern computing. In Unicode, the characters are
Umlauts also appear in other languages and contexts where diaeresis or trema marks indicate vowel separation