Heavy

The heavy metal umlaut, or \"rock dots\", is an umlaut over letters in the name of a heavy metal band, such as Mötley Crüe or Motörhead. more...

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The use of umlauts and other diacritics with a blackletter style typeface is a form of foreign branding intended to give a band's logo a Teutonic quality. It is a form of marketing that evokes stereotypes of boldness and strength commonly attributed to peoples such as the Vikings; author Reebee Garofalo has attributed its use to a desire for a \"Gothic horror\" feel. The heavy metal umlaut is never referred to by the term diaeresis in this usage, nor is it generally intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.

Heavy metal umlauts have been parodied in film and fiction. In the mockumentary film This Is Spın̈al Tap (spelled with an umlaut over the n), fictional rocker David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean) says, \"It's like a pair of eyes. You're looking at the umlaut, and it's looking at you.\" In 2002, Spin magazine referred to the heavy metal umlaut as \"the diacritical mark of the beast.\"

Umlauts and diaereses

The German word Umlaut roughly means change of pronunciation or sound shift, as it is composed of um-, \"re-\", and Laut, \"sound\". Adding an umlaut indeed changes the pronunciation of a vowel in standard (i.e. not heavy-metal) usage; the letters u and ü represent distinct sounds, as do o vs. ö and a vs. ä.

Umlauts, or visually similar graphemes, are used in many languages, including Brazilian Portuguese, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. The sounds represented by the umlauted letters in these languages are typically front vowels (front rounded vowels in the case of ü and ö). Ironically, these sounds tend to be perceived as \"weaker\" or \"lighter\" than the vowels represented by un-umlauted u, o, and a, and thus in the languages which use it normally, the umlaut does not evoke the impression of strength and darkness which its sensational use in English is intended to convey.

The English word diaeresis refers to a diacritic graphically similar to the umlaut; the name comes from a Greek word meaning \"divide or distinguish\". This diacritic is used in languages such as Greek, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese with varying purposes. Occasionally English and moreover Dutch employ a diaeresis to indicate that two vowels are to be pronounced separately, as in the name \"Chloë\" or the word \"naïve\". Although spellings such as reënact and coöperate have largely fallen into disuse, this use of the diaersis mark, or trema, is still used in some English-language publications.

Read more at Wikipedia.org