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See media help. The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet: German uses letter-diacritic combinations (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) using the umlaut and one ligature (ẞ/ß (called eszett (sz) or scharfes S, sharp s)), but they do not constitute distinct letters in the alphabet.
While the Council for German Orthography considers ä, ö, ü, ß distinct letters, [4] disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (considering special letters as variants of a, o, u, s ) and 30 (counting all special letters ...
Umlaut (diacritic) Umlaut (/ ˈʊmlaʊt /) is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ̈) as 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]).
A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"), from διακρίνω (diakrínō, "to distinguish"). The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in ...
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 ...
Ä in German Sign Language. A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a (when short), resulting in (or for many speakers) in the case of the long and in the case of the short . In German, it is called Ä (pronounced ) or Umlaut-Ä [citation needed].
Ö, or ö, is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter "o" modified with an umlaut or diaeresis. Ö, or ö, is a variant of the letter O. In many languages, the letter "ö", or the "o" modified with an umlaut, is used to denote the close- or open-mid front rounded vowels [ø] ⓘ or [œ] ⓘ.
Ü (lowercase ü) is a Latin script character composed of the letter U and the diaeresis diacritical mark. In some alphabets such as those of a number of Romance languages or Guarani it denotes an instance of regular U to be construed in isolation from adjacent characters with which it would usually form a larger unit; other alphabets like the Azerbaijani, Estonian, German, Hungarian and ...