Ä

Not to be confused with the Cyrillic letter Ӓ, the Slovak double acute letter A̋, or the double grave letter Ȁ.
For the sound ä represents in the IPA, see Open central unrounded vowel.

Ä (lowercase: ä) is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis. It is used mainly in Northern European and Central Asian languages. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it is sometimes used to represent the open central unrounded vowel.

General usage

The letter Ä occurs in the writing systems of languages around the world, though its use is most prominent in Northern Europe and Central Asia. European languages that use ä include Swedish,[1] German,[2] Luxembourgish,[3] Limburgish (in some orthographies),[4] North Frisian, Saterlandic, Finnish,[5] Estonian,[6] Skolt Sámi,[7] Karelian,[8] Emilian,[9]Inari Sámi and Slovak.

Ä appears in the Common Turkic Alphabet, and some Latin-based alphabets in Central Asia, including Tatar, Kazakh, Gagauz, and Turkmen use it. The letter is also used in some Romani alphabets[10] and the Austronesian language Rotuman.[11]

It generally denotes an unrounded vowel that is front or central in the mouth, and low or mid height. In Finnish, Kazakh, Turkmen and Tatar, this is always [æ]; in Swedish and Estonian, regional variation, as well as the letter's position in a word, allows for either [æ] or [ɛ]. In German and Slovak Ä stands for [ɛ] (or the archaic [æ]).

In the romanization of Nanjing Mandarin, Ä stands for [ɛ]. The Lessing-Othmer romanization scheme also used ä.[12]

Nordic Countries

In the Nordic countries, the vowel sound [æ] was originally written as "Æ" when Christianisation caused the former Vikings to start using the Latin alphabet around A.D. 1100. The letter Ä arose in German and later in Swedish from originally writing the E in AE on top of the A, which with time became simplified as two dots, consistent with the Sütterlin script. In the Icelandic, Faroese, Danish and Norwegian alphabets, "Æ" is still used instead of Ä.

Finnish adopted the Swedish alphabet during the 700 years that Finland was part of Sweden. Although the idea of the Germanic umlaut does not exist in Finnish, the phoneme /æ/ does. Estonian gained the letter through extensive exposure to German, with Low German throughout centuries of effective Baltic German rule, and to Swedish, during the 160 years of Estonia as a part of the Swedish Empire until 1721.

Emilian

Emilian, spoken in northern Italy, uses ä to represent [æ], occurring in some dialects, e.g. Bolognese bän [bæŋ] "good, well" and żänt [zæŋt] "people".[9]

Common Turkic Alphabet

Ä is a letter in the 2024 update of the 34-letter Common Turkic Alphabet, a project that seeks to create a Latin-based alphabet that is expansive enough to be used across all Turkic languages. Ä coexists with Ə in the CTA, both of which can represent the near-open front unrounded vowel [æ], with different languages picking one or the other.[13]

Kazakh

See also: Kazakh alphabets § Latin script

In 2021, Kazakhstan approved a multi-year transition to a Latin-based alphabet for the Kazakh language, to be completed by 2031. Based on President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev's 2021 decree finalizing the proposed alphabet, ä will represent the IPA sound /æ/, replacing the Cyrillic letter Ә.[14][15]

Tatar

The Turkic Tatar language is written officially in the Cyrillic script, but a Latin based alphabet is in limited use.[16]

The Tatar Cyrillic letter ә [æ] has been usually transliterated as ä, but in 2024, the Common Turkic Alphabet replaced it with ə, which is also used in Azeri Latin script. Tatar activists writing in the Latin script on social media have preferred to use this instead of ä as well; the main argument being that ä is aesthetically less pleasing when Tatar already owns a lot of umlauts (күбәләкләр, kübäläklär, kübələklər; 'butterflies').[17][18][19][20]

In Finland, while ä is found in Finnish, the Tatar community has traditionally tried to use only letters found in Turkish, and thus, have replaced it with e. This has left both the [e] and [ɯ] (ı) sounds as ı (keçkenä / keçkenə, kıçkıne; 'small'[a]). Nowadays however the spelling has had more influence from Tatarstan.[21][20]

Cyrillic

Main article: A with diaeresis (Cyrillic)

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

Umlaut-A

A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a [aː] ([a] when short), resulting in [ɛː] (or [eː] for many speakers) in the case of the long [aː] and [ɛ] in the case of the short [a]. In German, it is called Ä (pronounced [ɛː]) or Umlaut-Ä. Referring to the glyph as A-Umlaut is an uncommon practice, and would be ambiguous, as that term also refers to Germanic a-mutation. The digraph ⟨äu⟩ is used for the fronting diphthong [ɔʏ] (otherwise spelled with ⟨eu⟩) when it acts as the umlauted form of the backing diphthong [aʊ] (spelled ⟨au⟩); compare Baum [ˈbaʊm] 'tree' with Bäume [ˈbɔʏmə] 'trees'. In German dictionaries, the letter is collated together with A, while in German phonebooks the letter is collated as AE. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets. It has recently been introduced in revivalist Ulster-Scots writing.

The letter was originally an A with a lowercase e on top, which was later stylized to two dots.

In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as US-ASCII, Ä is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "Ae".

Phonetic alphabets

Typography

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 (Aͤ aͤ): this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwriting (A̎ a̎). 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. Unicode theoretically provides a solution by using the combining grapheme joiner (CGJ; U+034F), but recommends it only for highly specialized applications.[24]

Ä is also used to substitute Ə (the letter schwa) in situations where that glyph is unavailable, as used in the Tatar and Azeri languages. Turkmen started to use Ä officially instead of the schwa from 1993 onwards.

Computer use

Character information
Preview Ä ä
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS
Encodings decimal hex dec hex
Unicode 196 U+00C4 228 U+00E4
UTF-8 195 132 C3 84 195 164 C3 A4
Numeric character reference Ä Ä ä ä
Named character reference Ä ä

Notes

  1. ^ This mixes Tatar front and back vowels; if using e as [æ], a more correct spelling would be kiçkine, which then leaves letter i as the e-sound.

References

  1. ^ Svenska Akademien (1900). Svenska Akademiens ordlista: Sjunde upplagan [Swedish Academy dictionary: Seventh edition] (in Swedish). p. 321. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  2. ^ Rats für deutsche Rechtschreibung (2024). Amtliches Regelwerk der deutschen Rechtschreibung: Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis [Official Rules of German Spelling: Rules and Wordlist] (PDF) (in German). p. 31. ISBN 978-3-948831-65-3. Retrieved 3 November 2025. Die Umlautbuchstaben ä, ö, ü werden im Folgenden mit den Buchstaben a, o, u [The umlaut letters ä, ö, ü will be represented below by the letters a, o, u]
  3. ^ Arrêté ministériel du 10 octobre 1975 portant réforme du système officiel d'orthographe luxembourgeoise [Ministerial decree of 10 October 1975 reforming the official Luxembourgish spelling system] (PDF) (in French and Luxembourgish). 1975. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  4. ^ "Limbörgs Toetsebord" [Limburgish Keyboard]. Limbörgse Academie (in Limburgish). Retrieved 5 November 2025. Typ veur väöl: vaol spatie. [Type väöl by typing: vaol space.]
  5. ^ Korpela, Jukka K. (19 October 2025). "The alphabet". Handbook of Finnish, 2nd edition. Retrieved 5 November 2025.
  6. ^ Abondolo, Daniel (2015). The Uralic Languages. Routledge. p. 118. ISBN 978-1-136-13508-8. Retrieved 5 November 2025.
  7. ^ Feist, Timothy (2011). A Grammar of Skolt Saami (PhD Thesis). University of Manchester. p. 38. Retrieved 3 November 2025.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ^ "Kirjaimet". Karjalan kielioppi (in Livvi-Karelian). Archived from the original on 2016-03-03.
  9. ^ a b "L'urtugrafî" [The Orthography]. Al sît bulgnaiṡ (in Emilian and Italian). Retrieved 5 November 2025.
  10. ^ Kepeski, Krume; Jusuf, Šaip (1980). Romani gramatika (Ромска граматика) (in Macedonian and Romany). Skopje: Naša Kniga. p. 20. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  11. ^ Churchward, C. Maxwell (1940). Rotuman grammar and dictionary: comprising Rotuman phonetics and grammar and a Rotuman-English dictionary. p. 13. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  12. ^ Lessing, Ferdinand; Othmer, Wilhelm (1912). Lehrgang der nordchinesischen Umgangssprache [Northern Chinese colloquial language course] (in German). Tsingtau: Deutsch-Chinesische Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt (W . Schmidt). Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  13. ^ Abuova, Nagima (23 September 2024). "Turkic States Revive Latin-Based Alphabet to Preserve Linguistic Heritage". Archived from the original on 6 December 2024. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  14. ^ Satubaldina, Assel (1 February 2021). "Kazakhstan Presents New Latin Alphabet, Plans Gradual Transition Through 2031 - The Astana Times". Astana Times. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  15. ^ "«Қазақ тілі әліпбиін кириллицадан латын графикасына көшірудің кейбір мәселелері туралы» Қазақстан Республикасы Президенті Жарлығының жобасы" [Draft Decree of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan "On some issues of translation of the alphabet of the Kazakh language from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin script"]. Открытые НПА (in Kazakh). 6 May 2021. Retrieved 2 November 2025.
  16. ^ "Extended Cyrillic: Tatar".
  17. ^ "Neo-alif".
  18. ^ Ahmetcan, Aygul. "Learn Tatar".
  19. ^ "Tatar grammar – Tatar əlifbası". Instagram.
  20. ^ a b "Tatar-Finnish Dictionary".
  21. ^ Bedretdin, Kadriye (editor): Tugan Tel – Kirjoituksia Suomen tataareista. Helsinki: Suomen Itämainen Seura, 2011. ISBN 978-951-9380-78-0 (pp. 299–300)
  22. ^ "The International Phonetic Alphabet (revised to 2015)" (PDF). The International Phonetic Association. Retrieved 3 November 2025.
  23. ^ Sally Thomason (2 January 2008). "Why I Don't Love the International Phonetic Alphabet". Language Log. Archived from the original on 5 August 2011. Retrieved 3 January 2008.
  24. ^ "Unicode doesn't seem to distinguish between tréma and umlaut, but I need to distinguish. What shall I do?". FAQ - Characters and Combining Marks. Unicode. Archived from the original on 13 Jun 2025. Retrieved 2025-07-01.
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