Ä

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"Ä", or "ä", is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter A with umlaut, or a letter A with diaeresis.

Letter Ä

The letter Ä occurs in the Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, and Slovak alphabets, where it represents a vowel sound. In Finnish this is always Template:IPA; in Estonian regional variation allows for either Template:IPA and Template:IPA. In Swedish the letter is pronounced Template:IPA when directly preceding an r, elsewhere as Template:IPA (Regional variations exist.). Note that unlike the A umlaut (see below), the letter Ä can not be written as "ae". In German, the grammar guarantees that there are no minimal pairs for ä ~ ae. In Finnish, for example, there are a large number of such minimal pairs, e.g. hän ~ haen "s/he ~ I seek".

In Finnish, its name is Ä Template:IPA, not "A with two dots", since Ä represents an unrelated phoneme to A.

In the Slovak language Ä stands for Template:IPA (or a bit archaic but still correct Template:IPA). The diacritical sign is called dve bodky ("two dots"), and the full name of the letter "ä" is a s dvomi bodkami ("a with two dots").

A-umlaut

A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a, resulting in Template:IPA. With respect to diphthongs, Ä behaves as an E, e.g. Bäume Template:IPA (engl.: trees), just as if it was written Beume. The letter is collated together with A. The letter also occurs in some languages which have adopted German names or spellings, but is not a part of these languages' alphabets.

In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, A-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ae".

In the Icelandic, Danish and Norwegian alphabets, A-umlaut is often replaced with its equivalent "Æ".

A-diaeresis

A with diaeresis occurs in several languages which use diaereses. In these languages the letter represents a normal A, and the pronunciation does not change.

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