Umlaut (diacritic)
Diacritic mark to indicate sound shift / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The umlaut (/ˈʊmlaʊt/) is the diacritical mark (◌̈) used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, and ⟨ü⟩) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example [a], [ɔ], and [ʊ] as [ɛ], [œ], and [ʏ]). (The term Germanic umlaut is also used for the underlying historical sound shift process.)
In its contemporary printed form, the mark consists of two dots placed over the letter to represent the changed vowel sound. It looks identical to the diaeresis mark used in other European languages and is represented by the same Unicode code point. The word trema (French: tréma), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship, describes the form of both the umlaut diacritic and the diaeresis rather than their function and is used in those contexts to refer to either.