Umlaut Education

Being a somewhat competent German speaker, I have wondered for many years why umlauts appear over some English words in some books... coöperate, reënact, naïve, etc. In German, umlauts indicate a different pronunciation and in actuality are treated as separate letters, or at least pseudo-letters, to begin with. So, it never made much sense to my why they were in the middle of these normal English words. Maybe it was a typo, I thought, or some publisher idiosyncrasy about repeating vowels, but I never really took the time to find out. Obviously, I was always in the middle of reading when it happened, so I would just move on and forget about them. But more and more a pattern started to develop... it was always in older works and always on the second of two consecutive vowels.

As it turns out, it is not an umlaut at all, but is called a diaeresis and is used to indicate that the vowel under it is pronounced differently or separately from the preceding one. I've always thought the words look sort of awkward with the diaeresis, but it is a nice aid for pronunciation. Of course, seeing as English words like to be as difficult as possible to pronounce, the diaeresis is hardly used today.


If you're interested, there is a bit more history of the diaeresis here.