Ä

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

As an independent letter

The letter Ä occurs in the Swedish, Finnish, Estonian, and Slovak alphabets, where it represents a vowel sound. In Finnish this is always IPA| [æ] ; in Swedish and Estonian regional variation, as well as the letter's position in a word, allows for either IPA| [æ] and IPA| [ɛ] . In Slovak "Ä" stands for IPA| [ɛ] (or a bit archaic but still correct IPA| [æ] ).

In the Nordic countries, the vowel sound IPA| [æ] was originally written as "Æ" when Christianisation caused the former Vikings to replace the Runic alphabet with the Latin alphabet around 1100 AD. The letter Ä arose in Swedish from originally writing the e in ae on top of a, which with time became simplified as two dots. In the Icelandic, Faroese, Danish and Norwegian alphabets, "Æ" is still used instead of Ä.

Finnish later adopted the Swedish alphabet during the 500 years that Finland was part of Sweden. Although the phenomenon of Germanic umlaut does not exist in Finnish, the phoneme IPA| [æ] does. Estonian similarly gained the letter via Germanic influence.

In Cyrillic

Ä is used in some alphabets invented in the 19th century which are based on the Cyrillic alphabet. These include Mari, AltayFact|date=June 2008 and the Keräşen Tatar alphabet.

A-umlaut

A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet, although it is not regarded as a separate letter. It represents the umlauted form of "a", resulting in IPA| [æ] or IPA| [ɛ] . However, it is called "Ä", not "A Umlaut". With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. "Bäume" IPA|/boimə/ (Engl.: 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.

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

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 IPA|ə (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.

ee also

* Umlaut (diacritic)
* A with diaeresis (Cyrillic)

External links

* [http://www.lysator.liu.se/nordic/scn/faq18.html The Nordic graphemes FAQ]
* [http://www.istro-romanian.net/alphabet.html The IstroRomanians in Croatia: Alphabet]
* [http://www.thelocal.se/6867/ The Local - Sweden to phase out Å, Ä and Ö (April Fool's joke)]