Ä
Ä (lower case ä) is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it represents the open central unrounded vowel.
Usage
Independent letter
The letter Ä occurs as an independent letter in the
In the
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.
The letter is also used in some Romani alphabets.
Emilian-Romagnol
In
Kazakh
Under
Cyrillic
Ӓ is used in some alphabets invented in the 19th century which are based on the
.Umlaut-A
A similar glyph, A with
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
Phonetic alphabets
- In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ä represents an open central unrounded vowel (in distinction to an open front unrounded vowel).
- in the Low Rhenish, and a few related languages, "ä" represents the sound [ɛ].
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
In modern
Ä is also used to represent the ə (the
Computer encoding
| 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 | ||
| EBCDIC family | 99 | 63 | 67 | 43 |
16 |
196 | C4 | 228 | E4 |
| MS-DOS alt code | alt+142 | alt+132 | ||
References
- ^ Unicode FAQ Characters and Combining Marks – "Unicode doesn't seem to distinguish between trema and umlaut, but I need to distinguish. What shall I do?"
External links
