page_title: Ä
section_title: Independent letter
hierarchical_section_title: Ä / Usage / Independent letter
caption_attribution_description: English: The sign at the bus station of the Finnish town Mynämäki, illustrating a variation of the Latin letter Ä.
context_page_description: Ä is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis.
context_section_description: The letter Ä occurs as an independent letter in the Finnish, Swedish, Skolt Sami, Karelian, Estonian, Luxembourgish, North Frisian, Saterlandic, Emiliano-Romagnolo, Rotuman, Slovak, Tatar, Gagauz, German, 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] or [ɛ]. In German and Slovak Ä stands for [ɛ] (or the archaic but correct [æ]). In the romanization of the Nanjing dialect Ä stands for [ɛ].
  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 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 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.
caption: The sign at the bus station of the Finnish town Mynämäki, illustrating an artistic variation of the letter Ä.
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