Concept in Definition ABC

The umlaut are two horizontal points that are placed on the lyrics u, forming a ü. This spelling sign indicates that the u must be pronounced in the syllables güe and güi. Examples of words with umlauts are the following: bilingual, omen, stork, argue, slaughter, crankshaft, linguist, penguin, or flattering.

The use of the umlaut is intended to adapt the orthography of a word to its sound. If not, the word would be pronounced incorrectly. In this way, we observe that words such as warrior, ghetto or wink do not have an umlaut, but terms such as shame, fat or canoeist do.

Keep in mind that in Spanish the gu sound is pronounced gu only when it is not accompanied by an e or an i, so when to write gue o gui u is mute. On the other hand, the umlaut does not appear in the syllables gua or guo.

As for the etymological origin of the term, umlauts comes from the Greek and means division. In this way, its etymological origin corresponds to its true meaning, since the ü fulfills the function of dividing the pronunciation of a syllable.

The umlaut as an orthographic sign

Linguists call the umlaut with other lesser-known terms, specifically they call it cream or cremilla. As a spelling sign, the umlaut is a diacritical sign, like spelling accents, the sign of the ñ or the accent circumflex of some languages.

The umlaut is considered an auxiliary sign of the language, so it is in the same classification than the apostrophe or the asterisk.

The umlaut in other languages

The umlaut is used in languages ​​that come from Latin, for example Galician, French or Catalan, but also in languages ​​whose roots are not Latin, such as Dutch or Greek.

In the case of language Catalan the umlaut is used to indicate that the letter u must be read in front of the e in increasing diphthongs or to undo a decreasing diphthong (for example, pingüi or països). In this sense, the use of the umlaut in Catalan goes beyond the syllables gue or gui.

In French, the use of the umlaut has the function of indicating that when two vowels join together, the second has to be pronounced separately. In the case of English This spelling sign is not used, except in those cases in which a linguistic loan from another language is given. Finally, it is worth the pain remember that in some indigenous languages ​​this orthographic sign also plays a leading role (for example, in the language kakchikel that is spoken in Guatemala, the umlaut serves to indicate that the vowel that carries it must be pronounced with a certain intonation).

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