Umlaut (linguistics)


In linguistics, umlaut is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined in connection with the study of Germanic languages, as it had occurred prominently in the history of many of them. While a common English plural is umlauts, the German plural is Umlaute.
Umlaut is a form of assimilation, the process of one speech sound becoming more similar to a nearby sound. If a word has two vowels, one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, it takes more effort to pronounce. If the vowels were closer together, it would take less effort. Thus, one way the language may change is that these two vowels get be drawn closer together.
In the general sense, umlaut is essentially the same as regressive metaphony.
The most commonly seen types of umlaut are the following:
These processes may be named by the vowel that triggers the change. However, processes named in this fashion may not have consistent meanings across language families.
All of these processes occurred in the history of the Germanic languages; see Germanic umlaut for more details. I-mutation is the most prominent of the processes, to the extent that it is often referred to simply as "umlaut".
Similar processes also occurred in the history of the Celtic languages, especially Old Irish. In this context, these processes are often referred to as affection.
Vowel-raising umlaut occurred in the history of many of the Romance languages, in which it is normally termed metaphony.
The umlaut vowel diacritic was originally used to indicate vowels affected by Germanic umlaut.