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Ae is a digraph consisting of the letters A and E that occurs in many languages. In Irish orthography it stands for the vowel [e-] between two velarized consonants, e.g. Gael [g„e-“] "a Gael". Originally in Latin it represents the diphthong [ai], which in Vulgar Latin was monophthongized to [-]; in medieval manuscripts the digraph was frequently replaced by the ligature æ. In Modern English, words originally from Latin with ae generally now have [i], e.g. Caesar. In American English spelling, the digraph was shortened to e in most words that had the digraph when Noah Webster introduced spelling reform in the United States in 1806. In German orthography ae is a variant of ä found in some proper names or in contexts where ä is unavailable.
In Dutch it is also an older spelling variant of the aa digraph, but nowadays only occurs in names of people or (less often) in placenames.
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