Ü


Ü, is a character that typically represents a close front rounded vowel. It is classified as a separate letter in several extended Latin alphabets, but as the letter U with an umlaut/diaeresis in others such as Catalan, Galician, German, Occitan and Spanish. In French the letter U without diacritic character sounds like.
Although not a part of their alphabet, it also appears in languages such as Finnish and Swedish when retained in foreign names and words such as München and Finnish and Swedish spells said letter and sound in domestic words solely as Y. A small number of Dutch words also use this as a diaeresis.

U-umlaut

A glyph, U with umlaut, appears in the German alphabet. It represents the umlauted form of u, which results in the same sound as the. It can also represent Near-close near-front rounded vowel|. The letter is collated together with U, or as UE. In languages that have adopted German names or spellings, such as Swedish, the letter also occurs. It is however not a part of these languages' alphabets. In Swedish the letter is called tyskt y which means German y.
In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet or in limited character sets such as ASCII, U-umlaut is frequently replaced with the two-letter combination "ue". Software for optical character recognition sometimes sees it falsely as ii.

Letter Ü

The letter Ü is present in the Hungarian, French, Turkish, Uyghur Latin, Estonian, Azeri, Turkmen, Crimean Tatar, Kazakh Latin and Tatar Latin alphabets, where it represents a close front rounded vowel. It is considered a distinct letter, collated separately, not a simple modification of U or Y, and is distinct from UE.
In the Swedish and Finnish alphabets ü is alphabetized as y.
This same letter appears in the Chinese Romanisations pinyin, Wade-Giles, and the German-based Lessing-Othmer, where it represents the same sound : 綠/lü or 女/nü. Standard Mandarin Chinese pronunciation has both the sounds and. Pinyin only uses "Ü" to represent after the letters "L" or "N" to avoid confusion with words such as 路/lu and 怒/nu. Words such as 玉/yu or 句/ju are pronounced with, but are not spelled with "Ü", although Wade-Giles and Lessing use "Ü" in all situations. As the letter "Ü" is missing on most keyboards and the letter "V" is not present in standard Mandarin pinyin, the letter "V" is used on most computer Chinese input methods to enter the letter "Ü". As a result, romanisation of Chinese with the letter "V" representing the Ü sound is sometimes found. However, Ü sound should be officially represented by "yu" in Pinyin when it's difficult to enter Ü. For example, the surname Lü would be written as "Lyu" in the passports.

U-diaeresis

Several languages use diaeresis over the letter U to show that the letter is pronounced in its regular way, without dropping out, building diphthongs with neighbours, etc.
In Spanish, it is used to distinguish between "gue"/"güe" / and "gui"/"güi" /: nicaragüense, pingüino.
Similarly in Catalan, "gue~güe" are ~, "gui~güi" are ~, "que~qüe" are ~ and "qui~qüi" are ~,
as in aigües, pingüins, qüestió, adeqüi. Also, ü is used to mark that vowel pairs that normally would form a diphthong must be pronounced as separate syllables, examples: Raül, diürn.
In French, the diaeresis appears over the "u" only very rarely, in some uncommon words, capharnaüm , Capharnaüm/Capernaüm or Emmaüs. After the 1990 spelling reforms, it is applied to a few more words, like aigüe, ambigüe and argüer .

Usage in phonetic alphabets

In the Rheinische Dokumenta, a phonetic alphabet for many West Central German, the Low Rhenish, and few related vernacular languages, "ü" represents a range from to.

Typography

Historically the unique letter Ü and U-diaeresis were written as a U with two dots above the letter. U-umlaut was written as a U with a small e written above: this minute e degenerated to two vertical bars in medieval handwritings. In most later handwritings these bars in turn nearly became dots.
In modern typography there was insufficient space on typewriters and later computer keyboards to allow for both a U-with-dots and a U-with-bars. Since they looked near-identical the two glyphs were combined, which was also done in computer character encodings such as ISO 8859-1. As a result, there was no way to differentiate between the three different characters. While Unicode theoretically provides a solution, this is almost never used.

Computing codes

Keyboarding

The methods available for entering and from the keyboard depend on the operating system, the keyboard layout, and the application.