If a Spanish word has an umlaut in it, is the umlauted letter pronounced differently?

Answer 1

It seems to me that the Spanish spelling system is spelled more by syllables than by individual letters. While individual letters might have different sounds in different contexts, the same syllabic groups are more or less always pronounced the same way. For example, the letter group "ga" is always pronounced [ga] and the letter group "gue" is always pronounced [ge]. Notice that there are two sounds in each of those syllables, but the first one is represented by two letters and the other one is represented by three letters. There's not a one-to-one relationship between individual sounds and letters.

The syllable "güe" then, is a representation of yet another syllable [gwe] (yes, that's a "w" sound). Same thing with "güi"; it's pronounced [gwi], as opposed to "gui" [gi].

So my recommendation is simply to learn how certain syllables are spelled and use those syllables to spell and pronounce, not individual letters. This will help you out because sometimes adding an ending to a word, for example, changes the spelling of the stem, such as when "chico" is changed to "chiquito". That's because the [ko] syllable is spelled "co", while the [ki] syllable is always spelled [qui]. So if you learn to spell by syllables some of the spelling rules make sense.

The only main wrench in the works is the silent "h", which you will figure out. But if you don't it's not that big of a deal; many Spanish speakers have problems with it too. (Okay, there are a few more consonants that might cause problems, but you're smart enough to remember how words are spelled, I think.)

Answer 2

Yup. You actually pronounce the vowel.

Examples:
Pingüino (penguin) and you pronounce it Peen-goo-eeh-no
Vergüenza (shame) and it's pronounced Ver-goo-en-za (VER like in verb, EN like in hen and ZA like in sad)

The actual name of that umlaut is dieresis (diéresis in Spanish), and it is placed over one of two adjacent vowels to indicate that they are to be pronounced as separate sounds.

Of course it's hard to see that symbol since there are very few words that actually carry it.

Answer 3

It changes the sound of the word and sometimes its meaning.