- This page is about linguistics. 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
Germanic umlaut
In linguistics, the process of umlaut (from German um- "around", "transformation" + Laut "sound") or i-mutation is a modification of a back vowel which causes it to be pronounced more to the front of the mouth to accommodate a front vowel such as i in the following syllable, especially when that syllable is an inflectional suffix. This process is found in many languages.
The term umlaut was originally coined and is principally used in connection with the study of the Germanic languages. Umlaut was productive in the prehistory of these languages, in Proto-Germanic, and its results can be seen in the vowels of many words in all the modern Germanic languages.
Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declention of Germanic strong verbs sing/sang/sung.
Umlaut in English and German
Although umlaut itself has nothing to do with grammatical function, the resulting vowel changes took on such a function. We can see this in the English word man; in ancient Germanic, the plural had the same vowel, but also a plural suffix -ir. The suffix caused fronting of the vowel, and when the suffix later disappeared, the mutated vowel remained as the only plural marker: men. In English, such umlaut-plurals are rare, but other examples are tooth/teeth and goose/geese; compare also long (adj)/length (n). Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but it should be remembered that many English words contain a vowel which has been mutated in this way, but which does not now have a parallel unmutated form; Umlaut need not carry a grammatical function.
In German, umlaut as a marker of the plural of nouns is a regular feature of the language, and although umlaut itself is no longer a productive force in German, new plurals of this type can be created by analogy. Likewise, umlaut marks the comparative of many adjectives. Because of the grammatical importance of such pairs, the German umlaut diacritic (see below) was developed, making the phenomenon very visible. The result in German is that the vowels a, o and u become ä, ö and ü, and the diphthong au becomes äu: Mann/Männer ("man/men"), lang/länger (("long/longer"). (On the phonetic realisation of these, see the article on German pronunciation.) However, German orthography is not entirely consistent in this. The adjective fertig ("finished"; originally "ready to go") contains an umlaut mutation, but it is spelled with e rather than ä as its relationship to fahren (travel) has for most speakers of the language been lost from sight. On the other hand, German spells Känguruh ("Kangaroo") with an ä, although the origins of this vowel have nothing to do with umlaut.
Rückumlaut and wandel
Two interesting examples of umlaut involve vowel distinctions in Germanic verbs. Often these are subsumed under the heading "ablaut" in descriptions of Germanic verbs, but their origin is distinct.
The German word Rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut") is the slightly misleading term given to the vowel distinction between present and past tense forms of certain Germanic weak verbs. Examples in English are think/thought, bring/brought. (These verbs have a dental -t as a tense marker, therefore they are weak and the vowel change cannot be conditioned by ablaut.) The presence of umlaut is possibly more obvious in German denken/dachte ("think/thought"), especially if we remember that in German the letters ä and e are usually phonetically equivalent. The Proto-Germaic verb would have been *þankjan; the j cause umlaut in all the forms which had the suffix, but later disappeared. The term "reverse umlaut" indicates that if, with traditional grammar, we take the infinitive and present tense as our starting point, there is an illusion of a vowel-shift towards the back of the mouth (so to speak, ä>a) in the past tense, but of course the historical development was simply umlaut in the present tense forms.
The German word Wandel ("movement") is the technical term for a variety of umlaut in the 1st and 2nd person singular forms of the present tense of some Germanic strong verbs. For example German fangen ("to catch") has the present tense ich fange, du fängst, er fängt. Subsequent developments mean that this phenomenon does not always look like umlaut. For example geben ("give") has the present tense ich gebe, du gibst, er gibt, though the shift e>i would not be a normal result of umlaut in German. For all practical purposes this can be included in the ablaut tables, but its origin is not ablaut.
Umlaut in other languages
Parallel phenomena in other languages may also be termed umlaut or i-mutation. Examples can be found in other branches of the Indo-European lanugage family (though as independent developments, since umlaut occurred after the break-up of Proto-Indo-European) and also in Semitc and many other non-IE languages.
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.
Specifically when typing in German, if umlaut letters are not available, the proper way is to replace them by the underlying vowel and a following e. So, for example, "Schröder" becomes "Schroeder". As the pronunciation differs greatly between the normal letter and the umlaut, simply leaving the dots away is considered incorrect and irritates native speakers. The result might often be a different word, and in fact sentences can be constructed where the meaning would change, e.g. "Der Hauptmann gab den Soldaten Stützen/Stutzen", in English: "The major gave the soldiers supports/short rifles.
In Switzerland, capital umlauts are sometimes printed as digraphs, i.e., Ae, Oe, Ue, instead of Ä, Ö, Ü.
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").
Jacaltec, a Mayan dialect, and Malgasy are the only languages to allow an umlaut over the letter "n", although this was also jokingly used by the satirical rock band Spinal Tap.
In the text of the Hebrew Bible there are markings called jots that are somewhat similar. Jots are dots over certain words in certain passages used to draw emphasis to a passage.[1]
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 (e.g. Montjuïc) may be valid in different alphabets.
| Character | Replacement | HTML | Unicode |
|---|---|---|---|
| ä | ae | ä |
U+00E4 |
| ö | oe | ö |
U+00F6 |
| ü | ue | ü |
U+00FC |
| Ä | Ae | Ä |
U+00C4 |
| Ö | Oe | Ö |
U+00D6 |
| Ü | Ue | Ü |
U+00DC |
| Character | HTML | Unicode |
|---|---|---|
| ë | ë |
U+00EB |
| ï | ï |
U+00EF |
| ÿ | ÿ |
U+00FF |
| Ë | Ë |
U+00CB |
| Ï | Ï |
U+00CF |
| Ÿ | Ÿ |
U+0178 |
Entering umlauts via Alt-codes
On Microsoft Windows keyboard layouts that do not have umlaut characters, these characters can be entered by pressing the left Alt key, and entering the full numeric code on the numeric keypad.
| Character | Alt-code |
|---|---|
| ä | Alt+0228 |
| ö | Alt+0246 |
| ü | Alt+0252 |
| Ä | Alt+0196 |
| Ö | Alt+0214 |
| Ü | Alt+0220 |