Ä

The Ä (lower case ä, also called a-Umlaut) is a letter of the Latin writing system. It represents an A with an umlaut or an A with a trema.

The A with umlaut was first written as AE, partly contracted (Æ/æ). Later it developed into an A with a small E above it (Aͤ/aͤ). The small e was written as two vertical strokes in the further development of the Kurrent script, as well as the small e above the A. This way of writing has been preserved in the cursive script (and in Fraktur scripts) until today. In the antiqua script, the overwritten e was stylized into two dots.

The finger alphabet for the deaf or hard of hearing represents the letter Ä in the form of a closed fist with the thumb pointing upwards and making a short downward movement.

In good print, the umlaut dots differ from the two dots of the tremolo: the umlaut dots are smaller, closer together, and slightly lower.

In the German alphabet, the A with umlaut, the umlaut letter Ä, is usually pronounced /ɛ/.

In Finnish and Estonian, the letter is considered independent and not an A with trema. Accordingly, it cannot be written out as ae if the character is not available. The pronunciation is always /æ/.

The Slovak language also has an Ä, which is pronounced /ɛ/.

In Chinese transliterations for the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin, the Ä also stands for the /ɛ/ sound.

In Swedish, similar to Finnish, the Ä is a letter in its own right (but can be written out as ae if necessary). If it is followed by an R, the letter is pronounced /æ/, otherwise the pronunciation is /ɛ/.

In some Turkic languages that use the letter Ə, the Ä can be used as a substitute for the Ə. In the Turkmen language, the Ä has now officially replaced the Ə.

Display on the computer

Unicode contains the Ä at code points U+00C4 (uppercase) and U+00E4 (lowercase). In ISO 8859-1, the letter is encoded in the same places.

Older programs, which are still based on US-ASCII, for example, cannot represent ä or Ä. Here these characters are usually replaced by an ae or AE.

In TeX you can insert the Ä in text typesetting with the commands \"A and \"a or in graphical typesetting with \ddot A and \ddot a. With the package german.sty or with the package babel the input of the German umlauts to "a, "o and "u is simplified. By specifying a suitable option for the inputenc package, it is also possible to enter the umlauts directly in text mode.

In HTML there are the named characters Ä for the Ä and ä for the ä.

On Windows, you can also enter the capital Ä by using the combination Alt+142, and the lowercase ä by using the combination Alt+132. On Linux systems with newer versions of X11, the letter can be entered by Compose, ⇧Shift, 2a.

The old German Aͤ/aͤ can be set with U+0364 COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E (Unicode block Combining diacritical marks - ͤ following the respective letter).

See also