umlaut

Umlaut is a term used in linguistics and orthography to describe two related phenomena in Germanic languages: a diacritic mark consisting of two dots placed over a vowel, and a historical sound change in which a preceding vowel became fronted when affected by a following i or j. In German, the word umlaut can refer to the diacritic itself as well as to the vowel alternation that results from the sound change.

Etymology and development: The term comes from German umlaut, meaning a change of sound, derived from um- “around” and Laut “sound.” The umlaut phenomenon originated in Proto-Germanic and led to systematic fronting of vowels under the influence of a following i or j, a change that later became phonemic in some languages and left its mark in the orthography.

Orthography and pronunciation: In standard German, the umlaut marks produce the letters ä, ö, and ü (and their uppercase forms Ä, Ö, Ü). They modify the quality of the vowels, typically yielding fronted or rounded pronunciations distinct from a, o, and u. Examples include Mann with Männer (man versus men) and die Stadt with die Städte (city and towns). In many contexts the diacritic signals a separate phonemic vowel rather than merely a modification of an adjacent sound.

Usage beyond German: The two-dot diacritic is used in several other languages to indicate fronted or distinct vowels or to separate syllables in some spellings. In English, the symbol is sometimes referred to as a diaeresis when it marks that two adjacent vowels are to be pronounced separately, though in Germanic philology the term umlaut is more specifically tied to the historical sound change.

Digital representation: In Unicode, umlauted letters are encoded as Ä/ä (U+00C4/U+00E4), Ö/ö (U+00D6/U+00F6), and Ü/ü (U+00DC/U+00FC). In contexts that do not support diacritics, ä, ö, and ü are often written as ae, oe, and ue.