English: A historical linguistic companion. All languages except Gothic were affected by i-umlaut. This was the most significant of the various umlaut processes The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, Northern America, Oceania, and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, English, is also the world's most widely spoken language with an estimated 2 billion speakers. All Germanic languages are derived from Proto-Germanic, spoken i T…

*fōtiz). Germanic umlaut, as covered in this article, does not include other historical vowel phenomena that operated in the history of the Germanic languages The Germanic umlaut (sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel (fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to /i/ (raising) when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/. It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 CE and affected all of the early languages excep The Germanic umlaut (sometimes called i-umlaut or i-mutation) is a type of linguistic umlaut in which a back vowel changes to the associated front vowel (fronting) or a front vowel becomes closer to /i/ (raising) when the following syllable contains /i/, /iː/, or /j/. It took place separately in various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 CE and affected all of the early languages except Gothic. An example of the resulting vowel alternation is the English plural foot ~ feet (from Proto-Germanic *fōts, pl. *fōtiz). Germanic umlaut, as covered in this article, does not include other historical vowel phenomena that operated in the history of the Germanic languages such as Germanic a-mutation and the various language-specific processes of u-mutation, nor the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the conjugation of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung. While Germanic umlaut has had important consequences for all modern Germanic languages, its effects are particularly apparent in German, because vowels resulting from umlaut are generally spelled with a specific set of letters: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, and ⟨ü⟩, usually pronounced /ɛ/ (formerly /æ/), /ø/, and /y/. Umlaut is a form of assimilation or vowel harmony, the process by which one speech sound is altered to make it more like another adjacent sound. If a word has two vowels with one far back in the mouth and the other far forward, more effort is required to pronounce the word than if the vowels were closer together; therefore, one possible linguistic development is for these two vowels to be drawn closer together. 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⟩. This is a neat solution when pairs of words with and without umlaut mutation are compared, as in umlauted plurals like Mutter – Mütter ("mother" – "mothers"). However, in a small number of words, a vowel affected by i-umlaut is not marked with the umlaut…