Ö

Ö, or ö, is a character used in several extended Latin alphabets, or the letter O with umlaut to denote the front vowels [ø] or [œ]. In languages without umlaut, the character is also used as an "O with diaeresis" to denote a syllable break, wherein its pronunciation remains an unmodified [o].

This character resembles a face (two eyes and an open mouth); and is often used as an emoticon to show disbelief or surprise.

O-umlaut

The letter Ö, standing for "Österreich", i.e. Austria in German, on a boundary stone at the border between Austria and Germany.

The letter O with umlaut appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of o, resulting in [œ] or [ø]. The letter is often collated together with O in the German alphabet, but there are exceptions which collate it like oe or OE. The letter also occurs in some languages that have adopted German names or spellings, but it is not normally a part of those alphabets. In Danish and Norwegian, Ö was previously used in place of Ø in older texts to distinguish between open and closed ö-sounds. It is also used when confusion with other symbols could occur, on maps for instance. The Dano-Norwegian Ø is, like the German Ö, a development of OE and can compared with the French Œ.

In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, O-umlaut is frequently replaced with the digraph "oe".

Ö in other languages

The letter Ö also occurs in two other Germanic languages: Swedish and Icelandic, but it is regarded there as a separate letter, not as an umlauted version of O. Apart from Germanic languages, it occurs in the Uralic languages Finnish, Karelian, Veps, Estonian, Southern Sami, and Hungarian, in the Turkic languages such as Azeri, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur (Latin script), Crimean Tatar, Kazakh (Latin script), and in the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi, where it represents the vowel sounds [ø, œ]. Its name in Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, Estonian, Azeri, Turkish, Turkmen, Uyghur, Crimean Tatar, Hungarian, Slovak, Czech, Votic and Volapük is Öö [øː], not "O with two dots" since /ø/ is not a variant of the vowel /o/ but a distinct phoneme.

Unlike the O-umlaut, the letter Ö cannot be written as "oe". Minimal pairs exist between 'ö' and 'oe' (and also with 'oo', 'öö' and 'öe'). Consider Finnish eläinkö "animal?" (interrogative) vs. eläinkoe "animal test" (cf. Germanic umlaut). If the character Ö is unavailable, O is substituted and context is relied upon for inference of the intended meaning.

In Romagnol, ö is used to represent [ɔə~ɔː], e.g. cöt [kɔət~kɔːt] "cooked". In mountain dialects of Emilian, it is used to represent [ø], e.g. tött [tøtː] "all".

In Seneca, "ö" is used to represent [ɔ̃], a back mid rounded nasalized vowel.

In Swedish, the letter "ö" is also used as the one-letter word for an island, which is not to be mixed with the actual letter. Ö in this sense is also a Swedish-language surname.^[1]

Last letter of some alphabets

It is collated as an independent letter, sometimes by placing it at the end of the alphabet, such as in Swedish and Icelandic; and in Finnish, after Z, Å and Ä, thus fulfilling the place of "omega", for example in the Finnish expression aasta ööhön "from A to Z". However, in Hungarian, as well as Turkish and other Turkic alphabets that have Ö, it is an independent letter between O and P.

O-diaeresis

O with diaeresis occurs in several languages which use diaereses. In these languages the letter represents a normal O, and the pronunciation does not change (e.g. in the Dutch/Afrikaans word coöperatief [cooperative]).

In English

Some writers and publications, such as The New Yorker, use it in English words such as zoölogy and coöperate to indicate that the letter is pronounced separately. It is also commonly employed in names such as Laocoön, and in of the constellation Boötes.

Usage in phonetic alphabets

In the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and few related vernacular languages, "ö" represents the close-mid front rounded vowel with the IPA notation [ø].

The Uralic phonetic alphabet uses ⟨Ö⟩ as in Finnish to denote the front vowel [ø].

Codes for computing

Keyboard entry

Typography

Johann Martin Schleyer proposed an alternate form for Ö in Volapük but it was rarely used.

Unusual form of the OE or Ö ligature, with a small E inside the O. From an inscription in the crypt of Cologne (Koeln) Cathedral.

Historically O-diaeresis was written as an O with two dots above the letter. O-umlaut was written as an O with a small e written above in cursive old German (Gothic) script: this minute e is represented by two vertical bars connected by a slanted line, which then degenerated to two vertical bars in early modern handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots. The origin of the letter Ö was a similar ligature for the digraph OE: e was written above o and degenerated into two small dots.

In some inscriptions and display typefaces, Ö may be represented as an O with a small letter E inside.

In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both an O-with-dots (also representing Ö) and an O-with-bars. Since they looked nearly identical, the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result there was no way to differentiate between the different characters.

The Unicode code point for ö is U+00F6. Ö is U+00D6. It can also be created by compositing the character U+0308 "COMBINING DIAERESIS" with an "o" or "O". Though rarely used, as of version 3.2.0, Unicode also provides "COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E" at U+0364 which can produce the older umlaut typography, oͤ.

In TeX, Ö and ö are produced using \"{O} and \"{o} respectively.

Other alphabets containing this letter include the Azerbaijani alphabet, Welsh alphabet, Luxembourgian alphabet, Slovenian alphabet, Turkmen alphabet, Yapese alphabet and Dinka alphabet. The Hungarian alphabet contains both ö and ő: double acute o is the longer pair of ö. See double acute accent.

See also

• Diaeresis (diacritic)
• O with diaeresis (Cyrillic)
• Ø
• Metal umlaut
• Surprise (emotion)

References

External links

Look up ö in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• The IstroRomanians in Croatia: Alphabet
• Introduction to Swedish by Urban Sikeborg, Stockholm (1997-98)