The only vowel that is regularly fronted before an or is short : – , – . It must have had a greater effect than the orthography shows since all later dialects have a regular umlaut of both long and short vowels. I-mutation in Dutch Late Old Dutch saw a merger of and , causing their umlauted results to merge as well, giving . The lengthening in open syllables in early Middle Dutch then lengthened and lowered this short to long (spelled ) in some words. This is parallel to the lowering of in open syllables to , as in ("ship") – ("ships"). In general, the effects of the Germanic umlaut in plural formation are limited. One of the defining phonological features of Dutch, is the general absence of the I-mutation or secondary umlaut when dealing with long vowels. Unlike English and German, Dutch does not palatalize the long vowels, which are notably absent from the language. Thus, for example, where modern German has and English has feel (from Proto-Germanic ), standard Dutch retains a back vowel in the stem in . Thus, only two of the original Germanic vowels were affected by umlaut at all in Dutch: , which became , and , which became (spelled ). As a result of this relatively sparse occurrence of umlaut, standard Dutch does not use umlaut as a grammatical marker. An exception is the noun "city" which has the irregular umlauted plural . Later developments in Middle Dutch show that long vowels and diphthongs were not affected by umlaut in the more western dialects, including those in western Brabant and Holland that were most influential for standard Dutch. However in what is traditionally called the Cologne Expansion (the spread of certain West German features in the south-easternmost Dutch dialects during the High Medieval period) the more eastern and southeastern dialects of Dutch, including easternmost Brabantian and all of Limburgish have umlaut of long vowels (or in case of Limburgish, all rounded back vowels), however. Consequently, these dialects also make grammatical use of umlaut to form plurals and diminutives, much as most other modern Germanic languages do. Compare and "little man" from . North Germanic languages The situation in Old Norse is complicated as there are two forms of i-mutation. Of these two, only one is phonologized. I-mutation in Old Norse is phonological: In Proto-Norse, if the syllable was heavy and followed by