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

Contents

Letter Ä

A-umlaut

Typography

Ä in Cyrillic

See also

External links

Letter Ä

The letter 'Ä' occurs in the Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, and Slovak alphabets, where it represents a vowel sound. In Finnish this is always ; in Estonian regional variation allows for either and . In Swedish the letter is pronounced when directly preceding an r, elsewhere as (regional variations exist). 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 Swedish and Finnish, its name is Ä , 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 Swedish and Finnish alphabets after Z and Å but before Ö.
In the Slovak language ''Ä'' stands for (or a bit archaic but still correct ). 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").

A-umlaut

A similar glyph, 'A' with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of ''a'', resulting in or . With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. ''Bäume'' (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".
In the Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian alphabets, A-umlaut is mostly replaced with its equivalent "Æ".

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: 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 (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.

Ä 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.

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)