Two dots (diacritic)

In modern computer systems using Unicode, the two-dot diacritics are almost always encoded identically, having the same code point.

The word trema (French: tréma), used in linguistics and also classical scholarship, describes the form of both the umlaut diacritic and the diaeresis rather than their function and is used in those contexts to refer to either.

It derives from the Sutterlin script, formerly used widely in German handwriting, in which the letter e is formed as two short parallel vertical lines very close together (see under Sütterlin#Characteristics).

For example, the Brontë family, whose surname was derived from Gaelic and had been anglicised as "Prunty", or "Brunty": At some point, the father of the sisters, Patrick Brontë (born Brunty), decided on the alternative spelling with a diaeresis diacritic over the terminal ⟨e⟩ to indicate that the name had two syllables.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a double dot above a letter is used for a centralized vowel, a situation more similar to umlaut than to diaeresis.

In Udmurt, a double dot is also used with the consonant letters ӝ [dʒ] (from ж [ʒ]), ӟ [dʑ] (from з [z] ~ [ʑ]) and ӵ [tʃ] (from ч [tɕ]).

A number of languages in Vanuatu use double dots on consonants, to represent linguolabial (or "apicolabial") phonemes in their orthography.

In Arabic the letter ẗ is used in the ISO 233 transliteration for the tāʾ marbūṭah [ة], used to mark feminine gender in nouns and adjectives.

Although the origin of the Siyame is different from that of the diaeresis sign, in modern computer systems both are represented by the same Unicode character.

The N'Ko script, used to write the Mandé languages of West Africa uses a two-dot diacritic (among others) to represent non-native sounds.

The diacritics 〮 and 〯 , known as Bangjeom (방점; 傍點), were used to mark pitch accents in Hangul for Middle Korean.

Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with a two dots diacritic" as precomposed characters and these are displayed below.

[7] Since version 3.2.0, Unicode also provides U+0364 ◌ͤ COMBINING LATIN SMALL LETTER E which can produce the older umlaut typography.

If letters with double dots are not present on the keyboard, there are a number of ways to input them into a computer system.