11/29/2023 0 Comments Pronunciation two dots above a letterMy advice as a non-native German speaker is to focus on learning how to pronounce the umlauts in general, and then you’ll inherently start to use the short and long versions appropriately. Umlautįor those who are learning German, it may be hard to hear the difference or know when to use which version. To give you a better idea of how this works, take a look at the below examples. If you say them out loud, you can hear how the short ä is a bit more abrupt than the longer one. The short ä sounds a lot like the “e” in “bet” in English, while the long ä sounds more like the “ay” in “say”. We’ll go over how to pronounce the short and long versions of each umlaut in comparison with English. There are two ways to pronounce German umlauts depending on the word: short and long, which basically means how long you hold the sound for. Knowing how to pronounce these letters correctly is absolutely essential for improving your German language skills. Also note that these are not a replacement for the letters: a, o, and u, but rather are completely different letters with different pronunciation rules. German umlauts are letters in the German language with a particular type of pronunciation: ä, ö, and ü. Over time, these diacritical marks became an integral part of the German language, distinguishing words and altering their pronunciation. The umlaut dots, placed above the vowels ä, ö, and ü, emerged as a written representation of this phonetic shift. This transformation involved the fronting or raising of vowels, often accompanied by a change in sound quality. During the Old High German period, which spanned from the 6th to the 11th centuries, vowel sounds in certain words underwent a process known as umlaut. The origins of German umlauts can be traced back to the ancient Germanic languages. What are German umlauts and what’s their origin?
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