The umlaut process (as above) that occurred historically in Germanic languages whereby back vowels became front vowels when followed by syllable containing a front vocoid (e.g. Germanic lūsi > Old English līs(i) > Modern English lice)
Two horizontal dots over a letter, as in German Köpfe The umlaut is not distinguished from the diaeresis in the Unicode character encoding (See diaeresis )
The assimilation - through fronting, backing, raising, or lowering - of a class of vowels to a set of segments in an immediately neighboring syllable e g , PGmc *fulljan- > OE fyllan 'fill', PGmc *gulda > OE gold, OHG furi > NHG für 'for'
An umlaut is a symbol that is written over vowels in German and some other languages to indicate the way in which they should be pronounced. For example, the word `für' has an umlaut over the `u'. a sign (¨) written over a German vowel to show how it is pronounced (um- + laut )