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German has four special letters; three are vowels accented with an umlaut sign ( ä, ö, ü ) and one is derived from a ligature of ſ and z ( ß ; called Eszett "ess-zed/zee" or scharfes S "sharp s"). They have their own names separate from the letters they are based on.
The vowels of proto-Germanic and their general direction of change when i-mutated in the later Germanic dialects. Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this process that took place in the unattested earliest stages of Old English and Old Norse and apparently later in Old High German, and some other old Germanic languages.
The letter q in German only ever appears in the sequence qu (/kv/), with the exception of loanwords, e.g., Coq au vin or Qigong (which is also written Chigong). The letter x (Ix, /ɪks/) occurs almost exclusively in loanwords. Native German words that are now pronounced with a /ks/ sound are usually written using chs or cks, as with Fuchs (fox).
Umlaut (/ ˈ ʊ m l aʊ t /) is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ̈) as used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters ä , ö , and ü ) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example , , and as , , and ).
The charts below show the way International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Standard German language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
Ö, or ö, is a character that represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter "o" modified with an umlaut or diaeresis. Ö, or ö, is a variant of the letter O. In many languages, the letter "ö", or the "o" modified with an umlaut, is used to denote the close-or open-mid front rounded vowels ⓘ or ⓘ.
Besides the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, [b] Fraktur usually includes the Eszett ß in the ſʒ form, vowels with umlauts, and the long s ſ . Some Fraktur typefaces also include a variant form of the letter r known as the r rotunda , and many include a variety of ligatures which are left over from cursive handwriting and have ...
A similar glyph, A with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of a (when short), resulting in (or for many speakers) in the case of the long and in the case of the short . In German, it is called Ä (pronounced ) or Umlaut-Ä [citation needed].