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. Thus, for example, where modern German has "fühlen" and English has "feel" (from Proto-Germanic *"fōlijaną"), standard Dutch retains a back vowel in the stem in "voelen" . Thus, only two of the original Germanic vowels were affected by umlaut at all in western/standard Dutch: , which became , and , which became (spelled "u"). 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 "stad" "city" which has the irregular umlauted plural "steden".