Ä

"Ä", or "ä", is a character which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with umlaut or diaeresis.

As an independent letter

The letter Ä occurs in the Finnish, Estonian, and Slovak alphabets, where it represents a vowel sound. In Finnish this is always [æ]; in Estonian regional variation allows for either [æ] and [ɛ]. Note that unlike the A umlaut (see below), the letter Ä cannot be written as "ae". In Finnish, for example, there is a large number of such minimal pairs, e.g. hän ~ haen "s/he ~ I seek". In Finnish, its name is Ä [æː], not "A with two dots", since Ä represents an unrelated phoneme to A. It is considered a distinct letter separate from A, and placed in the Finnish alphabet after Z and Å but before Ö. In the Slovak language Ä stands for [ɛ] (or a bit archaic but still correct [æ]). 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 Scandinavian languages

In the Swedish language, the letter Ä historically arises from the Germanic umlaut, but it is not considered a simple modification of A. It is pronounced [æ] when directly preceding an r, elsewhere as [ɛ] (regional variations exist). When a keyboard can not produce the letter, ä may be written as "ae", e.g., äpple (apple) may be written as aepple. In the Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian alphabets, "Æ" is used as Ä in Swedish.

In Cyrillic

Ä is used in some alphabets invented in the 19th century which are based on the Cyrillic alphabet. These include Mari, Altay and the Keräşen Tatar alphabet.

A-umlaut

Ä in German Sign Language

A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a, resulting in [æ] or [ɛ]. With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. Bäume /boimə/ (Engl.: trees), just as if it were written Beume. The letter is collated together with A. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets. In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, A-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ae".

Typography

Johann Martin Schleyer proposed an alternate form for Ä in Volapük but it was rarely used. Its uppercase form resembled a Cyrillic ya.

Historically A-diaeresis was written as an A with two dots above the letter. A-umlaut was written as an A with a small e written above: this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots. Æ, a highly similar ligature evolving from the same origin as Ä, evolved in the Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian alphabets. The Æ ligature was also common in Old English, but had largely disappeared in Middle English. In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both A-diaeresis (also representing Ä) and A-umlaut. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result there was no way to differentiate between the different characters. While Unicode theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used. Ä is also used to represent the ə (the schwa sign) in situations where the glyph is unavailable, as used in the Tatar and Azeri languages. Turkmen started to use Ä officially instead of schwa. The HTML entity for Ä is Ä. For ä, it is ä (Mnemonic for "A umlaut"). The Unicode code point for ä is U+00E4. Ä is U+00C4.

See also

• Umlaut (diacritic)
• A with diaeresis (Cyrillic)

External links

• The Nordic graphemes FAQ
• The IstroRomanians in Croatia: Alphabet
• The Local - Sweden to phase out Å, Ä and Ö (April Fool's joke)