Diaeresis As the "diaeresis" diacritic, it is used to mark the separation of two distinct vowels in adjacent syllables when an instance of
diaeresis (or hiatus) occurs, so as to distinguish from a
digraph or
diphthong. For example, in the obsolete spelling
coöperate, the diaeresis reminded the reader that the word has four syllables
co-op-er-ate, not three. It is used in several languages of western and southern Europe, though rarely now in English. One well-known usage is in
French - the diaeresis is used in
naïve, which is commonly spelled in English without the diaeresis. It is, however, obligatory in French, to show that it is pronounced [na.iv] rather than [nɛv].
Umlaut As the "umlaut" diacritic, it indicates a
sound shift also known as
umlaut in which a
back vowel becomes a
front vowel. It is a specific feature of
German and other Germanic languages, affecting the graphemes , , and , which are modified to , , and . It can be seen in the
Sütterlin script, formerly used widely in German handwriting, in which the letter
e is formed as two short parallel vertical lines very close together (see under Sütterlin#Characteristics).
Stylistic use The two dot diacritic is also sometimes used for purely stylistic reasons. For example, the
Brontë family's surname was derived from
Gaelic and had been
anglicised as "Prunty", or "Brunty", but at some point, the father of the sisters,
Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), decided on the alternative spelling with a diaeresis diacritic over the terminal to indicate that the name had two syllables. Similarly, the "
metal umlaut" is a diacritic that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of
hard rock or
heavy metal bandsfor example, those of
Motörhead and
Mötley Crüe, and of parody bands, such as
Spın̈al Tap.
Other uses by language A double dot is also used as a diacritic in cases where it functions as neither a diaeresis nor an umlaut. In the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a double dot above a letter is used for a
centralized vowel, a situation more similar to umlaut than to diaeresis. In other languages it is used for vowel length, nasalization, tone, and various other uses where diaeresis or umlaut was available typographically. The IPA uses a double dot below a letter to indicate
breathy (murmured) voice.
Vowels • In
Albanian,
Tagalog,
Kashubian, and
Luxembourgish represents a
schwa [ə]. • In
Aymara, a double dot is used on for
vowel length. • In the Basque dialect of Soule, represents • In the DMG romanization of
Tunisian Arabic, , , , , and represent , , , , and . • In
Ligurian official orthography, is used to represent the sound . • In
Māori, a diaeresis (e.g. ) was often used on computers in the past instead of the
macron to indicate long vowels, as the diaeresis was relatively easy to produce on many systems, and the macron difficult or impossible. • In
Seneca, are
nasal vowels, though is , as in German umlaut. • In
Vurës (Vanuatu), and encode respectively and . • In the
Pahawh Hmong script, a double dot is used as one of several tone marks. • The double dot was used in the
early Cyrillic alphabet, which was used to write
Old Church Slavonic. The modern
Cyrillic Belarusian and
Russian alphabets include the letter (
yo), although replacing it with the letter without the diacritic is allowed in Russian. • Since the 1870s, , (
Cyrillic letter yi) has been used in the
Ukrainian alphabet for
iotated ; plain
і is not iotated . In
Udmurt,
ӥ is used for uniotated , with
и for iotated . • The form is common in
Dutch handwriting and also occasionally used in printed text – but is a form of
the digraph "ij" rather than a modification of the letter . •
Komi and
Udmurt use (a Cyrillic O with two dots) for Mid central vowel|. • The
Swedish,
Finnish and
Estonian languages use and to represent Near-open front unrounded vowel| and Mid front unrounded vowel| • In the languages of
J.R.R. Tolkien's
Middle-Earth novels, a diaeresis is used to separate vowels belonging to different syllables (e.g. in
Eärendil) and on final e to mark it as
not a
schwa or silent (e.g. in
Manwë,
Aulë,
Oromë, etc.). (There is no schwa in these languages but Tolkien wanted to make sure that readers wouldn't mistakenly pronounce one when speaking the names aloud.)
Consonants Jacaltec (a
Mayan language) and
Malagasy are among the very few languages with a double dot on the letter "n"; in both,
n̈ is the
velar nasal . In
Udmurt, a double dot is also used with the consonant letters
ӝ (from ж ),
ӟ (from з ) and
ӵ (from ч ). When distinction is important,
Ḧ and
ẍ are used for representing and in the Kurdish
Kurmanji alphabet (which are otherwise represented by "h" and "x"). These sounds are borrowed from Arabic.
Ẅ and
ÿ:
Ÿ is generally a vowel, but it is used as the (semi-vowel) consonant (a without the use of the lips) in
Tlingit. This sound is also found in
Coast Tsimshian, where it is written
ẅ. A number of languages in
Vanuatu use double dots on consonants, to represent
linguolabial (or "apicolabial") phonemes in their orthography. Thus
Araki contrasts bilabial
p with linguolabial
p̈ ; bilabial
m with linguolabial
m̈ ; and bilabial
v with linguolabial
v̈ . In
Arabic the letter
ẗ is used in the
ISO 233 transliteration for the
tāʾ marbūṭah [ة], used to mark feminine gender in nouns and adjectives.
Syriac uses a two dots above a letter, called
Siyame, to indicate that the word should be understood as plural. For instance, () means "house", while () means "houses". The sign is used especially when no vowel marks are present, which could differentiate between the two forms. Although the origin of the
Siyame is different from that of the diaeresis sign, in modern computer systems both are represented by the same Unicode character. This, however, often leads to wrong rendering of the Syriac text. The
N'Ko script, used to write the
Mandé languages of
West Africa uses a two-dot diacritic (among others) to represent non-native sounds. The dots are slightly larger than those used for diaeresis or umlaut.
Diacritic underneath The IPA specifies a "subscript umlaut", for example Hindi "potter"; ==Computer encodings==