u00e4

U+00E4, commonly written as ä, is the Latin small letter a with diaeresis. It represents a distinct character in several alphabets and is the lowercase form of Ä (U+00C4). It appears in the Latin-1 Supplement block of Unicode and is used in a number of European languages, most notably German, Swedish, Finnish, and some others.

In digital text, U+00E4 is encoded in UTF-8 as the two-byte sequence 0xC3 0xA4. In ISO/IEC 8859-1 and Windows-1252, it has the single-byte value 0xE4. In HTML, you can represent it as ä or as its numeric character reference ä.

Usage and linguistic role vary by language. In German, ä is an umlaut derived from historical vowel changes and commonly affects pronunciation and spelling, appearing in words such as Mädchen and Ärzte. In Swedish and Finnish, ä is treated as a distinct vowel in the alphabet, with its own phonological value and lexical significance. The character also appears in various loanwords and proper nouns across languages that adopt the Latin script.

Typography and input methods: ä is typically accessible on many keyboard layouts by using a dead key combination or a dedicated key, and it can be transliterated as ae in environments without umlauts. Related characters include Ä (uppercase) and the digraph ae used in some transliterations or older texts.

See also: Ä, U+00C4, Unicode, umlaut, Latin script.