In linguistics, umlaut (from German um- "around"/"the other way" + Laut "sound") is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages. In Germanic umlaut (also i-umlaut or i-mutation), a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel or a front vowel becomes closer to /i/ when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/. This process took place separately in the various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 AD, and affected all of the early languages[1] except for Gothic.[2]
Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.
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Umlaut is a form of assimilation, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. If a word has two vowels, one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, this requires a greater effort to pronounce than if the vowels were closer, and therefore one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together.
Germanic umlaut is a specific historical example of this in the unattested earliest stages of Old English, Old High German, or one of the other closely related early medieval language forms: When a two-syllable word had /a/, /o/ or /u/ in the first syllable and the front vowel /i/ in the second, the vowel in the first syllable was fronted. So, for example, pre-Old English *mūsi shifted to *mȳsi, which later lost its ending and became mȳs, then by later regular sound shifts became mīs and eventually modern English mice. Umlaut is the first stage of this: ū > ȳ. However, pre-Old English *mūs did not follow with a front vowel, and became modern mouse, explaining the different vowels in the singular and plural.
Although umlaut was not a grammatical process, umlauted vowels often serve to distinguish grammatical forms (and thus show similarities to ablaut when viewed synchronically). We can see this in the English word man; in ancient Germanic, the plural of this and some other words had the plural suffix -iz, and the same vowel as the singular. As it contained an i, this suffix caused fronting of the vowel, and, when the suffix later disappeared, the mutated vowel remained as the only plural marker: men. In English, such umlaut-plurals are rare. man, woman, tooth, goose, foot, mouse, louse, brother (archaic or specialized plural in brethren), and cow (poetic and dialectal plural in kine). Umlaut is conspicuous when it occurs in one of such a pair of forms, but there are many mutated words without an unmutated parallel form. Germanic actively derived causative weak verbs from ordinary strong verbs by applying a suffix, which later caused umlaut, to a past tense form. Some of these survived into modern English as doublets of verbs, including fell and set vs. fall (older past *fefall) and sit.
Parallel umlauts in some modern Germanic languages
| Germanic | German | English | Dutch | Swedish | Faroese |
| *fallanan - *fallijanan | fallen - fällen | to fall - to fell | vallen - vellen | falla - fälla | falla - fella |
| *fōts - *fōtiz | Fuß - Füße | foot - feet | voet - voeten (no umlaut) | fot - fötter | fótur - føtur |
| *aldaz - *alþizô - *alþistaz | alt - älter - am ältesten | old - elder - eldest | oud - ouder - oudst (no umlaut) | gammal - äldre - äldst (irregular) | gamal - eldri - elstur (irregular) |
| *fullaz - *fullijanan | voll - füllen | full - to fill | vol - vullen | full - fylla | fullur - fylla |
| *langaz - *langīn/*langiþō | lang - Länge | long - length | lang - lengte | lång - längd | langur - longd |
| *lūs - *lūsiz | Laus - Läuse | louse - lice | luis - luizen (no umlaut) | lus - löss | lús - lýs |
Development of umlauts in English
| Germanic | Old English | Modern English | |
| Singular | *mūs | mūs | /maʊs/ 'mouse' |
| Plural | *mūsiz | mȳs > mīs | /maɪs/ 'mice' |
| Singular | *fōts | fōt | /fʊt/ 'foot' |
| Plural | *fōtiz | fēt | /fiːt/ 'feet' |
(table adapted from Malmkjær 2002)
German orthography is generally consistent in its representation of i-umlaut. The umlaut diacritic, consisting of two dots above the vowel, is used for the fronted vowels, making the historical process much more visible in the modern language than is the case in English: a>ä, o>ö, u>ü, au>äu.
Sometimes a word has a vowel affected by i-umlaut, but the vowel is not marked with the umlaut diacritic. Usually the word with an umlauted vowel comes from an original word without umlaut, but the two are not recognized as a pair because the meaning of the umlauted word has changed.
The adjective fertig ("ready", "finished"; originally "ready to go") contains an umlaut mutation, but it is spelled with e rather than ä as its relationship to Fahrt (journey) has for most speakers of the language been lost from sight. Likewise, alt (old) has the comparative älter (older), but the noun from this is spelled Eltern (parents). Aufwand (effort) has the verb aufwenden (to spend, to dedicate) and the adjective aufwendig (requiring effort), though the 1996 spelling reform now permits the alternative spelling aufwändig (but not aufwänden).[3] For denken, see below.
On the other hand, some foreign words have umlaut diacritics that do not mark a vowel produced by the sound change of umlaut. Notable examples are Känguru from English kangaroo, and Büro from French bureau. In these cases the diacritic is a pure phonological marker, with no regard to etymology.
Für (for) is a special case; it is an umlauted form of vor (before), but other historical developments changed the expected ö into ü. In this case, the ü marks a genuine, but irregular umlaut.
Two interesting examples of umlaut involve vowel distinctions in Germanic verbs. Often these are subsumed under the heading "ablaut" in descriptions of Germanic verbs, giving them the name false ablaut.
The German word Rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut") is the slightly misleading term given to the vowel distinction between present and past tense forms of certain Germanic weak verbs. Examples in English are think/thought, bring/brought, tell/told, sell/sold. (These verbs have a dental -t or -d as a tense marker, therefore they are weak and the vowel change cannot be conditioned by ablaut.) The presence of umlaut is possibly more obvious in German denken/dachte ("think/thought"), especially if it is remembered that in German the letters <ä> and <e> are usually phonetically equivalent. The Proto-Germanic verb would have been *þankijanan; the /j/ caused umlaut in all the forms that had the suffix; subsequently the /j/ disappeared. The term "reverse umlaut" indicates that if, with traditional grammar, we take the infinitive and present tense as our starting point, there is an illusion of a vowel-shift towards the back of the mouth (so to speak, <ä>→<a>) in the past tense, but of course the historical development was simply umlaut in the present tense forms.
A variety of umlaut occurs in the 2nd- and 3rd-person singular forms of the present tense of some Germanic strong verbs. For example, German fangen ("to catch") has the present tense ich fange, du fängst, er fängt. The verb geben ("give") has the present tense ich gebe, du gibst, er gibt, though the shift e→i would not be a normal result of umlaut in German. There are in fact two distinct phenomena at play here; the first is indeed umlaut as it is best known, but the second is older and occurred already in Proto-Germanic itself. In both cases, a following i triggered a vowel change, but in Proto-Germanic this only affected e. The effect on back vowels did not occur until hundreds of years later, after the Germanic languages had already begun to split up: *fanhanan, *fanhidi with no umlaut of a, but *gebanan, *gibidi with umlaut of e.
I-mutation is particularly visible in the inflectional and derivational morphology of Old English, since it affected so many of the Old English vowels. Of 16 basic vowels and diphthongs in Old English, only the four vowels ǣ, ē, i, ī were unaffected by i-mutation. Although i-mutation was originally triggered by an /i/ or /j/ in the syllable following the affected vowel, by Old English times the /i/ or /j/ had generally dropped out or been modified (usually to /e/), with the result that i-mutation generally appears as a morphological process that affects a certain (seemingly arbitrary) set of forms. The most common forms affected are:
I-mutation affects vowels as follows:
| i-mutation | ||
|---|---|---|
| Original | Mutated | Examples |
| æ | e | þæc "covering" (cf. "thatch"), þeccan "to cover" |
| e | i | helpan "to help", hilpþ "(he/she) helps" |
| a+m/n | e+m/n | mann "man", menn "men" |
| a | æ, e | bacan "to bake", bæcþ "(he/she) bakes"; talu "tale", tellan "to tell" |
| ā | ǣ | lār "teaching" (cf. "lore"), lǣran "to teach" |
| o | e | dohtor "daughter", dehter "daughters" |
| ō | ē | fōt "foot", fēt "feet" |
| u, o | y | murnan "to mourn", myrnþ "(he/she) mourns"; gold "gold", gyldan "to gild" |
| ū | ȳ | mūs "mouse", mȳs "mice" |
| ea | ie | eald "old", ieldra "older" (cf. "elder") |
| ēa | īe | nēah "near" (cf. "nigh"), nīehst "nearest" (cf. "next") |
| eo | ie | beornan "to burn", biernþ "(he/she) burns" |
| ēo | īe | sēoþan "to boil" (cf. "seethe"), sīeþþ "(he/she) boils" |
Note:
A few hundred years after i-umlaut began, another similar change called double umlaut occurred. It was triggered by an /i/ or /j/ in the third or fourth syllable of a word and mutated all previous vowels—but it only worked when the vowel directly preceding the /i/ or /j/ was /u/. This /u/ typically appears as e in Old English or is deleted. Examples are:
As shown by the examples, affected words typically had /u/ in the second syllable, and mostly /a/ in the first syllable. Note also that the /æ/ developed too late to break to ea or to trigger palatalization of a preceding velar.
I-mutation is visible in Old High German (OHG), c. 800 AD, only on /a/, which was mutated to /e/. By this point, it had already become partly phonologized, since some of the conditioning /i/'s and /j/'s had been deleted or modified. The later history of German, however, shows that /o/ and /u/ were also affected — starting in Middle High German, the remaining conditioning environments disappear and /o/ and /u/ appear as /ø/ and /y/ in the appropriate environments.
This has led to a controversy over when and how i-mutation appeared on these vowels. Some (for example, Herbert Penzl)[4] have suggested that the vowels must have been modified already in OHG, but was not indicated due to the lack of proper symbols, and/or because they were still partly allophonic. Others (e.g. Joseph Voyles)[5] have suggested that the i-mutation of /o/ and /u/ was entirely analogical, and pointed to the lack of i-mutation of these vowels in certain places where it would be expected, in contrast to the consistent mutation of /a/. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between — i-mutation of /o/ and /u/ was indeed phonetic, occurring late in OHG, but later spread analogically to the environments where the conditioning had already disappeared by OHG (this is where failure of i-mutation is most likely).
In modern German, umlaut as a marker of the plural of nouns is a regular feature of the language, and although umlaut itself is no longer a productive force in German, new plurals of this type can be created by analogy. Likewise, umlaut marks the comparative of many adjectives, and other kinds of derived forms. Because of the grammatical importance of such pairs, the German umlaut diacritic was developed, making the phenomenon very visible. The result in German is that the vowels written as <a>, <o>, and <u> become <ä>, <ö>, and <ü>, and the diphthong <au> becomes <äu>: Mann/Männer ("man/men"), lang/länger ("long/longer"), Fuß/Füße ("foot/feet"), Maus/Mäuse ("mouse/mice"), Haus/Häuser ("house/houses"). On the phonetic realisation of these, see German phonology.
In Old Saxon, umlaut is much less apparent than in Old Norse. The only vowel that is regularly fronted before an /i/ or /j/ is short /a/. E.g. gast – gesti, slahan – slehis. NB I-umlaut must have had a greater effect than the orthography of OS shows. This is because all the later dialects have regular umlaut of both long and short vowels.
The situation in Old Dutch is similar to the situation found in Old Saxon and Old High German. Later developments in Middle Dutch show, however, that long vowels and diphthongs were not affected by umlaut in the more western dialects, including those in Brabant and Holland that were most influential for standard Dutch. Thus for example where modern German has fühlen /ˈfyːlən/ and English has feel /fiːl/ (from Proto-Germanic *fōlijanaN), Dutch retains a back vowel in the stem in voelen /ˈvulə(n)/.
Late Old Dutch saw a merger of /u/ and /o/, causing their umlauted results to merge as well. This means that only two of the original Germanic vowels were affected by umlaut at all in Dutch: /a/, which became /e/, and /u/, which became /y/ (spelled u). The lengthening in open syllables in late Old Dutch also affected /y/, which was lengthened and lowered to /øː/ (spelled eu). This is parallel to the lowering of /i/ in open syllables to /eː/, as in schip ("ship") - schepen ("ships").
The situation in Old Norse is complicated as there are two forms of i-mutation. Of these two, only one is phonologized. I-mutation in Old Norse is phonological if:
I-mutation is not phonological if the vowel of a long syllable is i-mutated by a syncopated i. I-mutation does not occur in short syllables.
| i-mutation | ||
|---|---|---|
| Original | Mutated | Example |
| a | e (ę) | fagr (fair) / fegrstr (fairest) |
| au | ey | lauss (loose) / leysa (to loosen) |
| á | æ | Áss / Ǽsir |
| jú | ý | ljúga (to lie) / lýgr (lies) |
| o | ø | koma (to come) / kømr (comes) |
| ó | œ | róa (to row) / rœr (rows) |
| u | y | upp (up) / yppa (to lift up) |
| ú | ý | fúll (foul) / fýla (stink, foulness) |
| ǫ | ø (ø̨[6]) | sǫkk (sank) / søkkva (to sink) |
Another type of mutation occurred in Faroese and Icelandic, where a changed to ø/o in Faroese and ö in Icelandic when preceded by u. Where Icelandic fronted all of its vowels to ö, Faroese did so as well, except in front of nasal consonants where the result was o. In addition, U-umlaut became so strong in Faroese, that even basic forms of words were changed:
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