Most of german nouns come with two dots above the character commonly known as “umlaut” in german.

Even names of persons or cities or verbs can contain umlauts in their names. By noticing umlauts in their names you can easily predict the persons origin is from german speaking country. For example..

Frank Müller (persons name)
Zürich (city in switzerland)
Österreich (Austria)
für ( for)

Rule: Umlauts can ONLY be placed above vowels a, o, u. This can be in uppercase or lowercase. This also means that umlauts above i,e do not exist. Beware that German is very case sensitive language.

ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü

Some of the examples  are…

If you are using english keyboard and since umlauts are special characters, you can alternatively write umlauts by adding ‘e’ to the umlaut vowel. For example to write Müller, you alternatively write Mueller

ä written as `ae`
ö written as `oe`
ü written as `ue`

There are also keyboard shortcuts possible in english keyboards. Here is how you need to combine the keys.

Keyboard Shortcuts to Umlauts

Ä – Ae – Alt+142
Ö – Oe – Alt+153
Ü – Ue – Alt-154

ä – ae – Alt+132
ö – oe – Alt+148
ü – ue – Alt+129

ß – ss – Alt+0223