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Ä (lowercaseä) is a character that represents either a letter from several extendedLatin alphabets, or the letterA with anumlaut mark ordiaeresis. It is used mainly in Northern European and Central Asian languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it is sometimes used to represent theopen central unrounded vowel.
The letterÄ occurs in the writing systems of languages around the world, though its use is most prominent in Northern Europe and Central Asia. European languages that useä includeSwedish,[1]German,[2]Luxembourgish,[3]Limburgish (in someorthographies),[4]North Frisian,Saterlandic,Finnish,[5]Estonian,[6]Skolt Sámi,[7]Karelian,[8]Emilian,[9]Inari Sámi andSlovak.
Ä appears in theCommon Turkic Alphabet, and someLatin-based alphabets in Central Asia, includingTatar,Kazakh,Gagauz, andTurkmen use it. The letter is also used in someRomani alphabets[10] and the Austronesian languageRotuman.[11]
It generally denotes an unrounded vowel that is front or central in the mouth, and low or mid height. In Finnish, Kazakh, Turkmen and Tatar, this is always [æ]; in Swedish and Estonian, regional variation, as well as the letter's position in a word, allows for either[æ] or[ɛ]. In German and SlovakÄ stands for[ɛ] (or the archaic[æ]).[citation needed]
In theromanization ofNanjing Mandarin,Ä stands for[ɛ].[citation needed] TheLessing-Othmer romanization scheme also usedä.[12]
In theNordic countries, the vowel sound[æ] was originally written as "Æ" whenChristianisation caused the formerVikings to start using theLatin alphabet around A.D. 1100. The letter Ä arose in German and later in Swedish from originally writing the E in AE on top of the A, which with time became simplified as two dots, consistent with theSütterlin script. In theIcelandic,Faroese,Danish andNorwegian alphabets, "Æ" is still used instead of Ä.
Finnish adopted the Swedish alphabet during the 700 years that Finland was part of Sweden. Although the idea of theGermanic umlaut does not exist in Finnish, the phoneme/æ/ does. Estonian gained the letter through extensive exposure to German, with Low German throughout centuries of effectiveBaltic German rule, and to Swedish, during the 160 years of Estonia as a part of theSwedish Empire until 1721.
Emilian, spoken in northern Italy, uses ä to represent[æ], occurring in some dialects, e.g.Bolognesebän[bæŋ] "good, well" andżänt[zæŋt] "people".[9]
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Ä is a letter in the 2024 update of the 34-letterCommon Turkic Alphabet, a project that seeks to create a Latin-based alphabet that is expansive enough to be used across allTurkic languages.Ä coexists withƏ in the CTA, both of which can represent thenear-open front unrounded vowel[æ], with different languages picking one or the other.[13]
In 2021,Kazakhstan approved a multi-year transition to a Latin-based alphabet for theKazakh language, to be completed by 2031. Based on PresidentKassym-Jomart Tokayev's 2021 decree finalizing the proposed alphabet,ä will represent the IPA sound /æ/, replacing the Cyrillic letterӘ.[14][15]
The TurkicTatar language is written officially in the Cyrillic script, but a Latin based alphabet is in limited use.[16]
The Tatar Cyrillic letter ә [æ] has been usually transliterated as ä, but in 2024, theCommon Turkic Alphabet replaced it withə, which is also used inAzeri Latin script. Tatar activists writing in the Latin script on social media have preferred to use this instead of ä as well; the main argument being that ä is aesthetically less pleasing when Tatar already owns a lot of umlauts (күбәләкләр, kübäläklär,kübələklər; 'butterflies').[17][18][19][20]
In Finland, while ä is found in Finnish,the Tatar community has traditionally tried to use onlyletters found in Turkish, and thus, have replaced it with e. This has left both the [e] and [ɯ] (ı) sounds as ı (keçkenä / keçkenə,kıçkıne; 'small'[a]). Nowadays however the spelling has had more influence from Tatarstan.[21][20]
Ӓ is used in some alphabets invented in the 19th century which are based on theCyrillic script. These includeMari,Altay[citation needed] and theKeräşenTatar alphabet.
A similar glyph,A withumlaut, appears in theGerman alphabet. It represents the umlauted form ofa[aː] ([a] when short), resulting in[ɛː] (or[eː] for many speakers) in the case of the long[aː] and[ɛ] in the case of the short[a]. In German, it is calledÄ (pronounced[ɛː]) orUmlaut-Ä[citation needed]. Referring to the glyph asA-Umlaut is an uncommon practice, and would be ambiguous, as that term also refers toGermanic a-mutation. The digraph⟨äu⟩ is used for the fronting diphthong[ɔʏ] (otherwise spelled with⟨eu⟩) when it acts as the umlauted form of the backing diphthong[aʊ] (spelled⟨au⟩); compareBaum[ˈbaʊm] 'tree' withBäume[ˈbɔʏmə] 'trees'. In German dictionaries, the letter iscollated together withA, while in German phonebooks the letter is collated asAE. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets. It has recently been introduced in revivalistUlster-Scots writing.
The letter was originally an A with a lowercase e on top, which was later stylized to two dots.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limitedcharacter sets such asUS-ASCII, Ä is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "Ae".
Historically A-diaeresis was written as anA with two dots above the letter. A-umlaut was written as anA with a smalle written above (Aͤ aͤ): this minutee degenerated to two vertical bars inmedievalhandwriting(A̎ a̎). In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots.
Æ, a highly similar ligature evolving from the same origin asÄ, evolved in theIcelandic,Danish andNorwegianalphabets. The Æ ligature was also common inOld English, but had largely disappeared inMiddle English.
In moderntypography there was insufficient space ontypewriters and latercomputer keyboards to allow for both A-diaeresis (also representingÄ) and A-umlaut. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computercharacter encodings such asISO 8859-1. As a result, there was no way to differentiate between the different characters.Unicode theoretically provides a solution by using thecombining grapheme joiner (CGJ; U+034F), but recommends it only for highly specialized applications.[24]
Ä is also used to substitute Ə (the letterschwa) in situations where that glyph is unavailable, as used in theTatar andAzeri languages.Turkmen started to use Ä officially instead of the schwa from 1993 onwards.
Die Umlautbuchstaben ä, ö, ü werden im Folgenden mit den Buchstaben a, o, u[The umlaut letters ä, ö, ü will be represented below by the letters a, o, u]
Typ veur väöl: vaol spatie.[Type väöl by typing: vaol space.]
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