Umlauts - two dots that make a difference

Many love them, some fear them and few can type them. The German umlauts (Umlaute) ä, ö and ü are not the only ones I will show you. I will also present the ß to you. It might look like a beta, but actually it's pretty different. Umlauts can be pretty important because some konjugated forms contain them although the infinitive doesn't. This can also happen with plurals like in Maus and Mäuse (mouse - mice).



How to type them?
When using windows there  actually is a way for you to type them. Depending on your windows version it might differ a little, but usually you can find it in the regional and country specific options. You can change the language settings of your keyboard there and add German as the "language" of your keyboard. Don't worry, it's no problem to switch back. Just alt + shift will do the job and your keyboard is back to... whatever it was.

This is how a German (well... mine...) keyboard looks like.

You can see the location of the umlauts here, same as you can see that the ß is next to the zero. Location of z and y also differ.

Too much work? Well, there's another option for you.

That's how you can also do it:

ä -> ae
ü -> ue
ö -> oe
ß -> ss

Writing ae instead of ä is also totally correct. Writing a instead of ä is wrong though because... well... because ä and a are simply not the same thing. ;) When doing a German crossword puzzle this is how you do it too. (and please never use a "B" instead of ß... that's really odd. It's like using a P instead of an R. Just one stroke is missing but... well... still not really the same, right?)

Enough writing, let's go oral. So how to pronunce them?
Let's start with the ß. When actually saying "ß" you say "s-z" (es-zet - german pronunciation of course). The ß is a long hissing sound. Different than the ß the "ss" is a short hissing sound. (so using ss instead of ß is actually not always right... but it will have suffice in case you have no german keyboard). Still, when reading a text you will get a good hint about how things are pronunced when knowing that difference.

I will further explain the pronunciation in another post soon.

So for now... have fun with your brandnew umlauts!




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