In modern handwriting, the umlaut sometimes looks like a breve, tilde, or other small mark.

Printing conventions in German

Despite this, the umlauted letters are not considered part of the alphabet proper. When alphabetically sorting German words, the umlaut is usually treated like the underlying vowel; if two words differ only by an umlaut, the umlauted one comes second, for example:

1. Schon
2. Schön
3. Schonen

There is a second system in limited use, mostly for sorting names (colloquially called "telephone directory sorting"), which treats ü like ue, and so on.

1. Schön
2. Schon
3. Schonen

Austrian telephone directories insert ö after oz.

1. Schon
2. Schonen
3. Schön

In Switzerland, capital umlauts are sometimes printed as digraphs, in other words, , , , instead of <Ä>, <Ö>, <Ü>. (See German alphabet for an elaboration.) This is because the Swiss keyboard contains the French accents on the same buttons as the umlauts (selected by Shift). To write capital umlauts with this keyboard requires temporarily activating the Caps Lock.

Borrowing of German umlaut notation

The Estonian alphabet has borrowed <ä>, <ö> and <ü> from German, Swedish and Finnish have <ä> and <ö>, and Slovak has <ä>. In Estonian, Swedish, Finnish and Sami <ä> and <ö> denote and respectively. Hungarian, on the other hand, has <ü>, and <ö>. The Slovak language uses the letter <ä> to denote (or a bit archaic but still correct ) — the sign is called dve bodky ("two dots"), and the full name of the letter ä is a s dvomi bodkami ("a with two dots"). In all these languages, however, the replacement rule for situations where the umlaut character is not available, is to simply use the underlying unaccented character instead (without a following e).

In Luxembourgish (Lëtzebuergesch), the umlaut diacritic represents a stressed schwa. Since the Luxembourgish language uses the mark to show stress, it cannot be used to modify the 'u' which therefore has to be 'ue'.

When Turkish switched from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet in 1928 it adopted a number of diacritics borrowed from various languages, including <ü>, which was taken from German (Turkey had a close relationship with Germany) and <ö> from Swedish, which in turn had borrowed this symbol from German. These Turkish graphemes represent similar sounds to their values in German. See Turkish alphabet.

As the borrowed diacritic has lost its relationship to Germanic i-mutation, they are in some languages considered independent graphemes, which not be replaced with , , or as in German. In Estonian and Finnish, for example, these latter diphthongs have independent meanings. Even some Germanic languages such as Swedish (whichdoes have a transformation analogous to the German umlaut, called omljud ), treat them as independent letters. In collation, this means they have their own positions in the alphabet, for example at the end ("A–Ö", not "A–Z") as in Swedish and Finnish, which means that the dictionary order is different from German. It also means that the transformations ä -> ae and ö -> oe are inappropriate for these languages.

Use of the umlaut for special effect

As the German short a is more open than the equivalent sound in English (/æ/), Germans sometimes use the diacritic ä to imitate the English sound in writing, giving an English "feel" to words used in advertising; in a McDonald's restaurant in Germany one can buy a "Big Mäc".

Since the letter ü is very common in Turkish, its inappropriate use can make a text in another language look "turkified", a purely visual mimicry. Because of the large number of Turks living in Germany, this again is a phenomenon familiar in German. The Turkish-German satirist Osman Engin, for example, wrote a book entitled Dütschlünd, Dütschlünd übür üllüs - the opening line of the German national anthem, but turkified!

In the heavy metal scene, the umlaut diacritic can frequently be observed as a mere decoration (with no significance for the pronunciation) on the names of bands such as Motörhead. The fictitious group Spın̈al Tap places an umlaut over the N. An interestingly self-referential example is the Finnish group Ümlaut. See the main article heavy metal umlaut.

Trema or Diaeresis

For example, according to the spelling rules of Catalan, the digraphs ei and iu are normally read as diphthongs, and . To indicate exceptions to this rule, a diaeresis mark is placed on the second vowel: without the trema the words veïna ("neighbour", feminine) and diürn ("diurnal") would be read and , respectively.

In French, some pairs of vowels that were originally true diphthongs later coalesced into monophthongs, which led to an extension of the value of this diacritic. It often now indicates that the second vowel is to be pronounced separately from the first, rather than merge with it into a single sound. For example, the French words païen , Anaïs , and naïve would be pronounced , and without the diaeresis mark, since the digraph ai is pronounced .

Another example is the Dutch spelling coëfficiënt, necessary because the digraphs oe and ie normally represent the simple vowels and , respectively.

Ÿ is sometimes used in transcribed Greek, where it represents the non-diphthong αυ (alpha upsilon), e.g. in the Persian name Artaÿctes at the very end of Herodotus. It occurs also in French as a variant of ï, in rare proper nouns (for instance, the name of the Parisian suburb of L'Haÿ-les-Roses).

In French words such as Gaëlle, however, the diaeresis is mostly etymological. While it's true that without it the digraph ae would be pronounced as the monophthong in Vulgar Latin, it would most likely be spelled with the ligature æ in that case, and in any event is never written ae in modern French orthography. As a further extension, other languages began to use the trema whenever they wish to indicate that a vowel should be pronounced separately from the preceding letter (possibly a consonant), with which it would normally form a digraph, according to the orthographic rules of that language. In the orthographies of Spanish, Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, French and Galician, the graphemes gu and qu normally represent a single sound, or , before the front vowels e and i, for historical reasons. In the few exceptions where the u is pronounced before i or e, a trema is added to it. Examples: Spanish vergüenza ("shame"), pingüino ("penguin"); Catalan aigües ("waters"), qüestió ("matter"); Brazilian Portuguese cinqüenta ("fifty"), qüinqüênio ("quinquennial").

In English

Other diacritical uses

The Cyrillic alphabet letters A, O and U (А, О, У) with trema have been used in the Altay, Mari and Keräşen Tatar alphabets for the sounds ä, ö, ü since the 19th century. The Rusyn alphabet uses both Ё, Ї and also ÿ for the "ü" sound. In the Udmurt language, the trema is also used with the consonant letters Zhe (Ж, ж → , ) and Ze (З, з → , ).

In Albanian, two dots over 'e' represent a schwa.

Jacaltec, a Mayan dialect, and Malagasy are the only languages to allow a pair of dots over the letter "n", which is presented in unicode as "n̈".

The usage of double dots over vowels, particularly ü, also occurs in the transcription of languages that do not use the Roman alphabet, such as Chinese. For example, 女 (meaning female) is transcribed as nü.

Ÿ occurs in handwritten Dutch as a glyph variant of the letter IJ.

In mathematics and physics

$\{\backslash dot\{a\}\}\; =\; \{\backslash mathrm\{d\}\; \backslash over\; \backslash mathrm\{d\}t\}\; a$

$\{\backslash ddot\{a\}\}\; =\; \{\backslash mathrm\{d\}\; ^2\; \backslash over\; \backslash mathrm\{d\}\; t^2\}\; a$

This may be contrasted with the more common notation for a derivative using a prime:

$f\text{'}(x)\; =\; \{\backslash mathrm\{d\}\; \backslash over\; \backslash mathrm\{d\}x\}\; f(x)$

$f\text{'}\text{'}(x)\; =\; \{\backslash mathrm\{d\}^2\; \backslash over\; \backslash mathrm\{d\}\; x^2\}\; f(x)$

In physics, a dot typically represents a (partial) time derivative $\backslash mathrm\; d\; \backslash over\; \backslash mathrm\; d\; t$ while a prime represents a spatial derivative $\backslash mathrm\; d\; \backslash over\; \backslash mathrm\; d\; x$.

In computers

Entering umlauts and tremas in HTML

Entering umlauts and tremas via special key sequences

On a computer running MacOS double dots can be entered be pressing option-u, followed by the vowel to have a double dot above it. X-based systems with the Compose key can usually enter characters with double dots by typing Compose, " followed by the letter.

The ISO 8859-1 character encoding includes the letters ä, ë, ï, ö, ü, and their respective capital forms, as well as ÿ in lower case only (Ÿ was added in the revised edition, ISO 8859-15). Dozens of more letters with double dots are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the double dot as a combining character U+0308. Unicode treats the umlaut and the trema as the same diacritic mark, and does not encode separate characters for the same letter with umlaut and with trema. In those cases where umlauts must be distinguished from tremas, the special character U+034F COMBINING GRAPHEME JOINER (CGJ) can be used:

For trema: X + CGJ + COMBINING DIAERESIS (e.g. )

For umlaut: X + COMBINING DIAERESIS (e.g. )

The HTML entities for these characters all end in uml; e.g. &auml; = ä. These entities however use the Unicode trema codepoints when rendered.

TeX also allows double dots to be placed over letters in math mode, using "\ddot{}", or outside of math mode, with the \" control sequence:

$\backslash mathrm\{\backslash ddot\{a\}\backslash ddot\{b\}\backslash ddot\{c\}\backslash ddot\{d\}\backslash ddot\{e\}\backslash ddot\{A\}\backslash ddot\{B\}\backslash ddot\{C\}\backslash ddot\{D\}\backslash ddot\{E\}\}$

However this will give the trema-style dots that are too far above the letter's body for good typographical umlauts. TeX's "German" package should be used if possible: it adds the " control sequence (without backslash) which gives nice umlauts.

On the Apple Macintosh, the double dot is produced with the keystroke Option+U, followed by the character to receive it.

Using Microsoft Word, the double dot is produced by pressing Ctrl+Shift+:, then the letter.

See also

• Diacritic
• Diaeresis
• Dot (diacritic)
• Acute accent
• Grave accent
• Circumflex
• Ess-tsett
• Heavy metal umlaut
• Horn
• Macron
• Ring
• Tilde
• Tittle

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
• Keyboard Help - Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer

Diacritics

Dièresi | Trema | Trema | Diéresis | Tréma | Trema | トレマ | Trema | Trema | Умлаут (диакритический знак) | Treema