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That depends. In English, ¨ is a diacritic mark called diaeresis, which indicates that a vowel is distinct, and shouldn't be diphthongized or dropped: Coöperation, Noël, Brontë. In German, ¨ is a diacritic mark called umlaut, which transforms the vowels A, O, and U into their umlauted versions: Ä, Ö, and Ü. These characters are not distinct letters of the German alphabet, but belong to a special weird in-between class. In Swedish, ¨ is not a diacritic mark, does not have a name, and is simply an integral part of the letters Ä and Ö, which together with Å are distinct letters of the Swedish alphabet. The dots aren't modifiers, they're not optional, Ä is not sort-of-an-A, it's as distinct from A as any other vowel, and its pronunciation is closer to E than A. |