A - wikipedia A Ä 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. Contents 1 Usage 1.1 Independent letter 1.2 Emilian - Romagnol 1.3 Cyrillic 1.4 Umlaut - A 1.5 Phonetic alphabets 1.6 Typography 1.7 Computer encoding 2 References 3 External links Usage Independent letter Sign of Jyväskylä, city in Finland. The letter Ä occurs as an independent letter in the Swedish, Finnish, Skolt Sami, Karelian, Estonian, Luxembourgish, North Frisian, Saterlandic, Emiliano - Romagnolo, Rotuman, Slovak, Tatar, Gagauz, 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 ) ( or a bit archaic but still correct ( æ ) ). 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 ( æ ) 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. 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 until 1721. The letter is also used in some Romani alphabets. Emilian - Romagnol In Emilian - Romagnol ä is used to represent ( æ ), occurring in some Emilian dialects, e.g. Bolognese bän ( bæŋː ) `` well '' and żänt ( ðæŋːt ) `` people ''. Cyrillic Main article : A with diaeresis ( Cyrillic ) Ӓ 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. Umlaut - a Ä in German Sign Language A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a, resulting in ( ɛ ) ( or ( e ) for many speakers ). In German, it is called `` Ä '' ( pronounced ( ɛ ) ) or `` Umlaut - A ''. Referring to the glyph as `` A-Umlaut '' is an uncommon practice, and would be ambiguous, as that term also refers to `` Germanic a-mutation ''. With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. Bäume / ˈbɔʏmə / ( 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. 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 distinction to an open front 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 Johann Martin Schleyer proposed an alternate form for Ä in Volapük but it was rarely used. Its uppercase form resembled a Cyrillic я ( ya ). 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 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, but recommends it only for highly specialized applications. Ä is also used to represent the 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 the schwa from 1993 onwards. Computer encoding Character Ä ä Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS Encodings decimal hex decimal hex Unicode 196 U + 00C4 228 U + 00E4 UTF - 8 195 132 C3 84 195 164 C3 A4 Numeric character reference & # 196 ; & # xC4 ; & # 228 ; & # xE4 ; Named character reference &Auml ; &auml ; EBCDIC family 99 63 67 43 ISO 8859 - 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 9 / 10 / 13 / 14 / 15 / 16 196 C4 228 E4 MS - DOS alt code alt + 142 alt + 132 References Jump up ^ Unicode FAQ Characters and Combining Marks -- `` Unicode does n't seem to distinguish between trema and umlaut, but I need to distinguish. What shall I do ? '' External links Look up ä in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. The IstroRomanians in Croatia : Alphabet Latin script History Spread Romanization Roman numerals Alphabets ( list ) Classical Latin alphabet ISO basic Latin alphabet phonetic alphabets International Phonetic Alphabet X-SAMPA Spelling alphabet Letters ( list ) Letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz Letter A with diacritics Áá Àà Ăă Ắắ Ằằ Ẵẵ Ẳẳ Ââ Ấấ Ầầ Ẫẫ Ẩẩ Ǎǎ Åå Ǻǻ Ää Ǟǟ Ãã Ȧȧ Ǡǡ Ąą Ą́ą́ Ą̃ą̃ Āā Ā̀ā̀ Ảả Ȁȁ A̋a̋ Ȃȃ Ạạ Ặặ Ậậ Ḁḁ Ⱥⱥ ᶏ aʾ Letters using umlaut or diaeresis sign ( ◌ ̈, ◌ ̤ ) Ää Ëë Ḧḧ Ï ï N̈n̈ Öö T̈ẗ Üü Ṳṳ Ẅẅ Ẍẍ Ÿÿ Multigraphs Digraphs ch cz dž dz gh ij ll ly nh ny sh sz th Trigraphs dzs eau Tetragraphs ough Pentagraphs tzsch Keyboard layouts ( list ) QWERTY QWERTZ AZERTY Standards ISO / IEC 646 Unicode Western Latin character sets Lists precomposed Latin characters in Unicode letters used in mathematics Diacritics Palaeography Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title= Ä&oldid = 831482646 '' Categories : Specific letter - diacritic combinations Vowel letters Latin - script ligatures Uncommon Latin letters Hidden categories : All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from June 2008 Talk Contents About Wikipedia Alemannisch Беларуская Català Čeština Dansk Deutsch Eesti Español Esperanto فارسی Føroyskt Français 한국어 Íslenska Italiano ქართული Коми Latina Magyar Nāhuatl Nederlands 日本 語 Nordfriisk Norsk Polski Português Runa Simi Русский Simple English Slovenčina Slovenščina Sranantongo Српски / srpski Suomi Svenska Tagalog Татарча / tatarça Türkçe Українська Volapük 中文 33 more Edit links This page was last edited on 20 March 2018, at 20 : 33. 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Question: what does an a with two dots over it mean
Answer: a letter from several extended Latin alphabets