"Ä" and "ä" are both characters that represent either a letter from several extended Latin
alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.
Usage Independent letter
The letter Ä occurs as an independent letter in the Swedish, Finnish, Skolt Sami, Karelian,
Estonian, Luxembourgish, North Frisian, Saterlandic, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Rotuman, French, Slovak,
Tatar, and Turkmen alphabets, where it represents a vowel sound.
In Finnish and Turkmen this is always [æ]; in Swedish and Estonian regional variation,
as well as the letter's position in a word, allows for either [æ] and [ɛ].
In German and Slovak Ä stands for [ɛ].
In the Nordic countries, the vowel sound [æ] was originally written as "Æ" when Christianisation
caused the former Vikings to replace the Runic alphabet with 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.
In the Icelandic, Faroese, Danish and Norwegian alphabets, "Æ" is still used instead of Ä.
Finnish later adopted the Swedish alphabet during the 700 years that Finland was part
of Sweden.
Although the phenomenon of Germanic umlaut does not exist in Finnish, the phoneme [æ]
does.
Estonian gained the letter through high and extensive exposure to Germanic languages with
Swedish in-particular during the 160 years of Estonia as an occupied, later integrated
part of the Swedish Empire.
The letter is used in some Romani alphabets as well.
Emiliano-Romagnolo In Emiliano-Romagnolo alphabet the letter
ä represents the near-open front unrounded vowel [æː].
Emiliano-Romagnolo makes a distinction between long and short vowels, and ä is ever long.
For example, Bolognese dialect words bän, meaning well, and źänt, meaning people,
are pronunciated [bæːŋ] and [ðæːŋt] Cyrillic
Ä 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.
A-umlaut
A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet.
It represents the umlauted form of a, resulting in [ɛ].
In German, it is however called "Ä" or "Umlaut-A", not "A-Umlaut".
With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. Bäume . 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 In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ä
represents an open central unrounded vowel. in the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet
for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and 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: 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 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, but recommends it only for highly specialized
applications.
Ä is also used to represent the ə in situations where the glyph is unavailable, as used in
the Tatar and Azeri languages.
Turkmen started to use Ä officially instead of schwa.
Computer encoding External links
The Nordic graphemes FAQ The IstroRomanians in Croatia: Alphabet
References