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An umlaut is the pair of dots written above a vowel in German — the ¨ in ü, ö and ä, as in München, Köln, and Fräulein. The dots are not decoration. They tell you the vowel has changed to a different sound: German u is "oo", but ü is made with your lips rounded like "oo" while your tongue sits where it would for "ee". That is why English speakers find München so hard to say. The word has two levels, and this is the part worth knowing. In everyday use, "umlaut" means the two dots — the mark on the page. But among people who study language, umlaut is also the name of the sound change itself: a vowel shifting because of a vowel in the syllable after it. English went through this long ago, which is why our plurals are strange in a few old words — foot/feet, tooth/teeth, mouse/mice, man/men. Those are umlaut at work, frozen into the language a thousand years ago. Tell your students that and the messy plurals suddenly have a reason. A note on the same-looking mark elsewhere: two dots over a vowel in French or Spanish (naïve, Zoë) are called a diaeresis, not an umlaut, and they do a different job — they say "pronounce this vowel separately from the one before it". Same dots, different name, different meaning. And in the names of heavy metal bands (Motörhead, Mötley Crüe) the dots mean nothing at all; they are there to look tough, and English speakers jokingly call that a "metal umlaut".
變音符號、母音變音（德文 ü ö ä 上面那兩點）。台灣德語課本多半直接說「變母音」或用德文原詞 Umlaut；不要跟法文的「分音符 diaeresis」（naïve 的兩點）混為一談。
組成Borrowed from German in the 1800s: um- ("around, about, re-") + Laut ("sound"). So literally "sound-around" — a sound turned into another sound. German Laut goes back through Old High German lūt to the same ancient root that gave English the word loud.
同家族的字
- loudfrom the same ancient root as German Laut, "sound" — the two words are distant relatives
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
umlautnoun/ˈʊm.laʊt/
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human-scienceslinguisticssciencesAn assimilatory process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vocoid that is separated by one or more consonants.
- In fits of concealed despair that went unnoticed even by those close enough to touch, Julien cursed the language of umlauts, eszetts, and gerunds.
- A tittle is more or less the same thing (the dot over an i, for instance), except that it can be traced back to Medieval Latin for a little mark over or under a letter, such as an accent ague or a cedilla. I don't know whether an umlaut is one or two tittles. Maybe it's a jot and a tittle side by side.
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human-scienceslinguisticssciencesThe umlaut process (as above) that occurred historically in Germanic languages whereby back vowels became front vowels when followed by syllable containing a front vocoid (e.g. Germanic lūsiz > Old English lȳs(i) > Modern English lice).
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human-scienceslinguisticssciencesA vowel so assimilated.
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communicationsjournalismliteratureThe diacritical mark ( ¨ ) placed over a vowel when it indicates a (rounded) front vowel
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informalcommunicationsjournalismliteratureSynonym of diaeresis.
- "Naïve" takes an umlaut because it is pronounced as two syllables.
- California, like several other states, prohibits the use of diacritical marks or accents on official documents. That means no tilde (~), no accent grave (`), no umlaut (¨) and certainly no cedilla (¸).
umlautverb/ˈʊm.laʊt/
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To place an umlaut over (a vowel).
- We kept some of the foreign alphabet symbols such as the accented and umlauted vowels and Greek letters and used the rest of the space for more esoteric linguistic symbols such as "barred-l," and "engma."
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human-scienceslinguisticssciencesTo modify (a word) so that an umlaut is required in it.
- an umlauting vowel
- These, together with (some) Romansh lects, belong to our West Rhaetian; the /ȫ/ also supported by two lects from the Ticino which by our criteria are NWIt, and by the partially umlauting lects of Lombardy which together with (some) Engadine lects belong to our East Rhaetian.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。