****The double-dot symbol placed over a letter is called a diaeresis or dieresis (die-AIR-uh-sis). It is an umlaut only when doing that wierd vowel-sound thing to it, as described above. The Spanish diaeresis is not an umlaut because it is not providing the same function, but instead separating the vowel from the surrounding letters, as does the English one (my personal favorite example is preäntepenultimate, meaning fourth-to-last). Conversely, any other orthographical marker, like accents or circumflexes or cidillas or what-have-you, can be an umlaut if it signifies the appropriate vowel change for whatever language happens to use it. The sound can also appear in a language without a marker to denote it, as in the French u. -LoganGordon
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