Umlauts for your English Keyboard

Jul 9, 2008 by Dan Taylor    3 Comments    Posted under: Technology

Many of you already know that I live in Austria.  A land of great skiing, beer, and würst.  It’s also the land of funny little letters with dots over them.  While they look more or less identical to their non-dotted cousins, the tone and sound of these vowels (and one consonant) sound quite a bit different.

For example:

o – sounds like the o you find in the word ‘whole’

ö – on the other hand sounds like a double o combination – ‘woot’

Normally, when I write in german I have to substitute the umlaut with an oe that creates the same sound.  The primamry reason being that I write on a mac with an international english keyboard.  I say international english, as there is a difference between the US english and UK english keyboards, as I quickly found out in 2001 while living in the UK.

While this issue is not normally a bother for anyone that reads my written German (as it’s probably filled with a number of grammatical mistakes, the umlaut are easy to overlook), it came to a head the other day regarding the work über.  I titled one of my DJ mixes ubertrance and sent it over to Ludwig.  A bit later in the day I noticed his Skype message read – “über, not uber”.  I sent him a message saying something along the lines of, “I know…I know…but I don’t have any umlauts on my keyboard and ueber just looks rediculous”.  He agreed that ueber did in fact look rediculous, and within minutes sent back this link.

After reading what it does and how very easy it is to install and activate…well, there was no reason not to have an EnglishGerman keyboard.  So…if you’re like me working on an English keyboard, but find yourself having to copy/paste umlauts from wikipedia everytime you need one, go grab the USGerman Keyboard Layout for your mac.