thumb|Latin letter A with diaeresis

Ä (minuscule: 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

thumb|Sign of Stäket, a [[residential area in Järfälla Municipality, Sweden]]

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, German, Luxembourgish, Limburgish (in some orthographies), North Frisian, Saterlandic, Finnish, Estonian, Skolt Sámi, Karelian, Emilian,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 and the Austronesian language Rotuman.

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 []; in Swedish and Estonian, regional variation, as well as the letter's position in a word, allows for either or . In German and Slovak Ä stands for (or the archaic ).

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

Nordic Countries

thumb|right|The sign at the bus station of the Finnish town [[Mynämäki, illustrating an artistic variation of the letter Ä]]

In the Nordic countries, the vowel sound 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 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 , occurring in some dialects, e.g. Bolognese "good, well" and "people".

Kazakh

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 //, replacing the Cyrillic letter Ә.

Tatar

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

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').

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'). Nowadays however the spelling has had more influence from Tatarstan.

  • in the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, Low Rhenish, and a few related languages, "ä" represents the sound .

Typography

thumb|[[Johann Martin Schleyer proposed alternate forms for Ä and ä (Ꞛ and ꞛ, respectively) in Volapük but they were rarely used.]]

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.

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

See also

  • Æ
  • Å
  • Æ
  • Œ
  • Ø
  • Ö

Notes

References

  • The IstroRomanians in Croatia: Alphabet