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Ä (lowercase ä) is a character that represents either a letter from several extended , or the letter A with an umlaut mark or diaeresis. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it represents the open central unrounded vowel.
In the Nordic countries, the vowel sound was originally written as "Æ" when Christianisation caused the former Vikings to start using the Latin alphabet around A.D. 1100. The letter Ä arose in German and later in Swedish from originally writing the E in AE on top of the A, which with time became simplified as two dots, consistent with the Sütterlin script. In the Icelandic, Faroese alphabet, Danish alphabet and Norwegian alphabets, "Æ" is still used instead of Ä.
Finnish adopted the Swedish alphabet during the 700 years that Finland was part of Sweden. Although the idea of the Germanic umlaut does not exist in Finnish, the phoneme does. Estonian gained the letter through extensive exposure to German, with Low German throughout centuries of effective Baltic Germans rule, and to Swedish, during the 160 years of Estonia as a part of the Swedish Empire until 1721.
The letter is also used in some Romani alphabets.
The Tatar Cyrillic letter ә æ has been usually transliterated as ä, but in 2024, the Common Turkic Alphabet replaced it with ə, which is also used in Azeri Latin script. Tatar activists writing in the Latin script on social media have preferred to use this instead of ä as well; the main argument being that ä is aesthetically less pleasing when Tatar already owns a lot of umlauts (күбәләкләр, kübäläklär, kübələklər; 'butterflies').
In Finland, while ä is found in Finnish, Finnish Tatars has traditionally tried to use only Turkish alphabet, and thus, have replaced it with e. This has left both the e and ɯ (ı) sounds as ı (keçkenä / keçkenə, kıçkıne; 'small'). Nowadays however the spelling has had more influence from Tatarstan.Bedretdin, Kadriye (editor): Tugan Tel – Kirjoituksia Suomen tataareista. Helsinki: Suomen Itämainen Seura, 2011. (pp. 299–300)
The letter was originally an A with a lowercase e on top, which was later stylized to two dots.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited such as ASCII, Ä is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "Ae".
Æ, a highly similar ligature evolving from the same origin as Ä, evolved in the Icelandic, Danish alphabet and Norwegian . The Æ ligature was also common in Old English, but had largely disappeared in Middle English.
In modern typography there was insufficient space on and later computer keyboards to allow for both A-diaeresis (also representing Ä) and A-umlaut. Since they looked near-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. Unicode theoretically provides a solution by using the combining grapheme joiner (CGJ; U+034F), but recommends it only for highly specialized applications.
Ä is also used to substitute Ə (the letter schwa) in situations where that glyph is unavailable, as used in the Tatar language and . Turkmen language started to use Ä officially instead of the schwa from 1993 onwards.
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