In Finnish, the letters "ä", "ö" and "y" are the "front vowel" counterparts to the "back vowel" letters "a", "o" and "u" — grammatical endings and word suffixes using these letters will use either the front or back form depending on the vowel harmony of the word they are affixed to. The glyphs for "ä" and "ö" are derived from the similar looking German umlauted letters, but as with "y" versus "u", they are considered letters in their own right and thus alphabetized separately (after "z").