Does anyone know what the two dots over certain words (such as the 'e' on Zoe) are called?

Answer 1

dairisis or dirisis. It is for mostly Germanic languages and in Spanish where the U after G is dipthonged with a following e as in verguenza. VER GWEN ZA.
In German it produces a special sound when over an O that does not appear in English, like in Hoss, pronounced Hess.
In your example it forces the e to be pronounced separately instead of saying ZO you say ZO EE

Answer 2

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there are two different diacritics matching this description. there's the diaeresis or trema, which you can see in words like naïve or the spanish vergüenza. there's also the umlaut, used most famously in german, such as in schön. they are very similar in appearance. wikipedia explains: "In professional typography, umlaut dots are usually a bit closer to the letter's body than the dots of the trema...In handwriting, however, no distinction is visible between the two. This is also true for most computer fonts and encodings." i'll note that the characters i used in my examples are the ones i use for both the daeresis and the umlaut; as far as i know, my computer fonts make no distinction (which is usual, according to wikipedia).

Answer 3

I was taught in German classes that they were called umlauts
Definitions of umlaut on the Web:

A kind of vowel mutation that consists in the change of a vowel into another influenced by some feature of a vowel in the following syllables. In German (where the term comes from) Umlaut means the fronting of a back vowel conditioned by the presence of a following front vowel (tur ~ türchen, Haus ~ Häuse, etc.). English preserves some words that used to have a plural ending in /i/ (now lost) and alternate back and front vowels, such as foot ~ feet, mouse ~ mice, etc. See also ablaut.
www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/glossary.html

A "double dot over a letter". The double-dot (called a diuresis; the letter-symbol combination is called an umlaut) is the correct, German way of writing the word; the ue, oe or ae letter combinations are a way of representing the umlaut in non-germanic alphabets which lack the umlauts.
freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~randyj2222/gendictu.html

Two horizontal dots over a letter, as in German Köpfe. The umlaut is not distinguished from the diaeresis in the Unicode character encoding. (See diaeresis.)
pipin.tmd.ns.ac.yu/unicode/www.unicode.org/glossary/

Two dots placed above a vowel, such as ä, ö, and ü, which are used in German and other European languages to indicate a change in the pronunciation of a vowel. See Diaeresis.
www.stevenblack.com/intl%20glossary.html

a diacritical mark (two dots) placed over a vowel in German to indicate a change in sound
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Answer 4

Umlaut :

(In linguistics, the process of umlaut (from German um- "around" + Laut "sound") is a modification of a vowel which causes it to be pronounced more similarly to a vowel or semivowel in a following syllable. The term umlaut was originally coined and is principally used in connection with the study of the Germanic languages. In umlaut, a back vowel is modified to the associated front vowel when the following syllable contains [i], [iː] or [j] (the sound of English ). This process took place separately in the various Germanic languages starting around 450 or 500 AD, and affected all of the early languages except for Gothic.

Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut (vowel gradation), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verbs such as sing/sang/sung.)

Answer 5

Two Dots Over A Letter

Answer 6

The two dots over a vowel is called the umlaut.

Answer 7

a pair of dots abovë a vowël is callëd an umlaut.

Answer 8

Umlaut. It gives the vowel under it a slightly different sound.

Answer 9

those dots are called an umlaut. It is used in German and other similar languages

Answer 10

an umlaut (pronounced oom-lau)