In Asterix and the Great Crossing, our heroes encounter Norsemen, who speak French with lots of gratuitous diacritics.
Do names that actually need umlaut, such as Björk and Teräsbetoni really count? Björk is a real name and teräsbetoni also means something, whereas terasbetoni would be at least half gibberish.
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An in-between case. Natively, these marks are natural and necessary, as you point out.
But the appeal to the Anglosphere, which an international artist would seek, does rely on the phenomenon.
It is a two-for.
"The setting of the Inheritance Trilogy Cycle is called Alagaësia, pronounced: Ala-gay-sea-ah. The ümlaut over the e is completely superfluous and does not affect the pronunciation of the name in any way. In fact, given the way it's pronounced the correct phonetic spelling of the word would actually look something akin to: Alagæsia."
I'm removing the nonsensical last sentence. "Correct phonetic spelling" is only meaningful in the context of a well-defined system mapping graphemes to phonemes. Using "æ" for the "ay" vowel is not part of any phonetic spelling system I'm familiar with. (Incidentally, in English, "æ" only occurs in loanwords from Latin and Greek, and is pronounced "ee" or "e", though it's increasingly common to hear "ay", due to confusion with Gaelic loanwords in which (non-ligatured) "ae" really is pronounced "ay".)
The Dutchmen Moet and Citroen (oe in Dutch is ooh) placed a dieresis on their name in order to aid pronunciation in France.
This is why you know them as Moët and Citroën. However, the Francophone is unlike the Anglosphere, and adding these marks makes the words seem *less* exotic.
(Note: aha! they should have changed their names to Mout and Çitroun, then, if oe is ooh; bit they thought it better to reinforce the tendency the French already exhibited in pronouncing the Dutch words.)
Edited by tweekatten