Umlaut - Definition and Overview

This page is about punctuation. There is also a band called Ümlaut.

The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark.

Vowel modification

In linguistics, the process of umlaut (from German um- "around", "transformation" + Laut "sound") is a modification of a vowel which causes it to be pronounced more to the front of the mouth to accommodate a vowel in the following syllable, especially when that syllable is an inflectional suffix. This process is found in many — especially Germanic — languages.

For example, the German noun Mann (man) with the a pronounced as in English "father" (but short), becomes Männer [ˈmɛnər] or [ˈmɛnɐ] in the plural, with the ä pronounced like the e in "edit", a front vowel sound that is assimilated to the vowel in the -er suffix. The original conditioning environment in German was an i or j in the following syllable (the plural suffix originally was -ir). Later, umlaut acquired a grammatical function and was extended by analogy, for example to form plurals like Ofen [ˈoːfən] / Öfen [ˈøːfən] ("oven"/"ovens"). Note that English, being a Germanic language, has preserved some of these changes in irregular inflected forms such as man/men, tooth/teeth, long (adj)/length (n), goose/geese, etc., even though it has lost the suffixes that originally caused them, and has changed their spelling. In English, the process was called i-mutation.

An umlaut should be distinguished from a change in vowel indicating a difference in grammatical function, called an ablaut, as in sing/sang/sung. Ablaut originated in the Proto-Indo-European language, whereas umlaut originated later, in Proto-Germanic. These terms may also be used for similar changes in other language families.

Diacritical mark

The word is also used to refer to the diacritical mark composed of two small dots placed over a vowel (¨) to indicate this change in German. A similar mark is used to indicate diaeresis in other languages, but the umlaut dots are very close to the letter's body in a well-designed font, while the diaresis dots are a bit further above — in computer screen fonts the difference is usually not noticeable, but in printed material it is. The origin of the graphical symbol lies in the following e, which was originally written above in tiny form. In handwritings of the Middle Ages until (in Germany) 1941, the e looked like two tiny strokes (compare the Sütterlin minuscule "e"). In script form this simplified to two bars above the letter. These bars became confused with the diaeresis, and are now normally written as two small dots above. The umlauts are ä, ö, and ü.

In Finnish, Hungarian and North Germanic languages (i.e., Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish) characters (ü, ä, ö, and å) looking similar to German umlauts are considered letters in their own right, despite their representing sounds similar to the corresponding sounds in German. As it is not a case of marking grammatical variation, i.e., of tempus or modus, nor of syllable modification, it is neither a case of umlaut nor of diacritical marking. Hence it ought to be improper to call these characters umlauts; however, there is no more precise descriptor in English.

When typing in German, if umlaut letters are not available, they have to be replaced by the underlying vowel and a following e (Ersatzdarstellung). So, for example, "Schröder" becomes "Schroeder". Replacing the umlaut letter with just the underlying vowel would cause ambiguities in many cases.

The Slovak language uses an umlaut over the letter a, turning it into Ää, indicating that it should be pronounced as /ɛ/ (or a bit archaic but still correct /æ/) instead of /a/. The diacritical 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 Switzerland, capital umlauts are sometimes printed as digraphs, i.e., Ae, Oe, Ue, instead of Ä, Ö, Ü.

The Welsh language uses an umlaut when a vowel is doubled, as in seremonïau (sermoni-iau).

Entering umlauts in HTML

In HTML umlauts can be entered with an &?uml; entity reference. All umlauts are part of all Latin versions of the ISO 8859 character sets and thus have the same codepoints in ISO-8859-1 (-2, -3, -4, -9, -10, -13, -14, -15, -16) and Unicode.

In addition to the umlauts, some dotted vowels may be valid in different alphabets.

See also

• acute accent
• circumflex
• diacritic
• diaeresis
• ess-tsett
• grave accent
• heavy metal umlaut
• inherently funny word