Two dots (diacritic)

Diacritical marks of two dots ¨, placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in a number of languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerous others. For example, in Albanian, ë represents a schwa. Such diacritics are also sometimes used for stylistic reasons (as in the family name Brontë or the band name Mötley Crüe).

In modern computer systems using Unicode, the two-dot diacritics are almost always encoded identically, having the same code point.^[1] For example, U+00E4 ä LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS represents both a-umlaut and a-diaeresis. Their appearance in print or on screen may vary between typefaces but rarely within the same typeface.

The word trema (French: tréma), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship, describes the form of both the umlaut diacritic and the diaeresis rather than their function and is used in those contexts to refer to either.

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