What is o with two dots?

Ö with two dots (Ö, ö) is a letter found in several alphabets, most notably the German, Swedish, Finnish, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, Uyghur, and Hungarian alphabets. It represents a front rounded vowel sound. Its name in German is "Ö" (pronounced like the letter itself), in Swedish it's "Ö" (pronounced roughly like "er" in "herd"), and in Turkish it's "ö" (a close-mid front rounded vowel).

• Origin and History: The letter "Ö" generally evolved as a variant of "O" with a diacritic mark, originally indicating umlaut (a sound change that moves a vowel towards the front of the mouth). This umlauted form of "o" became its own distinct letter. See more on umlauts.

• Pronunciation: The pronunciation of "Ö" varies depending on the language.

  • In German, "Ö" represents a close-mid front rounded vowel IPA: /ø/. It's phonetically similar to the French "eu" as in "feu".
  • In Swedish, the pronunciation is also a close-mid front rounded vowel, though there can be slight variations.
  • In Finnish, "Ö" represents a close-mid front rounded vowel, very similar to the German pronunciation.
  • In Turkish, "Ö" represents a close-mid front rounded vowel, IPA: /œ/. It is different from the sound in German and Swedish.
  • In Hungarian, it represents two different phonemes, a short [ø] and a long [ø:].

• Usage in Languages:

  • German: "Ö" is a core letter, appearing in many common words. See more on German Alphabet.
  • Swedish: "Ö" is one of the three extra letters (å, ä, ö) added to the end of the Swedish alphabet. See more on Swedish Alphabet.
  • Finnish: "Ö" is also one of the extra letters (ä, ö) added to the end of the Finnish alphabet. See more on Finnish Alphabet.
  • Turkish: "Ö" is a distinct letter representing a phoneme not found in English. See more on Turkish Alphabet.
  • Hungarian: It is an important letter that represents different vowel sounds depending on the length. See more on Hungarian Alphabet.

• Representation in Computing: "Ö" and "ö" have specific Unicode code points. They also have HTML entities.

• Transliteration: When "Ö" or "ö" are not available, they may be transliterated as "Oe" or "oe," though this is generally discouraged, especially in languages where "oe" represents a different sound.