German orthography is the orthography used in writing the German language, which is largely phonemic. However, it shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. The pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the case.
Today, Standard High German orthography is regulated by the (Council for German Orthography), composed of representatives from most German-speaking countries.
Alphabet
The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus four special letters.
Basic alphabet LetterNameDIN 5009:2022-06, section 4.2 „Buchstaben“ (letters), table 1Name(IPA)SpellingAlphabetAaAntonBbBertaCcCäsarDdDoraEeEmilFfFriedrichGgGustavHhHeinrichIiIdaJj,JuliusKkKaufmann,KonradLlLudwigMmMarthaNnNordpolOoOttoPpPaulaQq,QuelleRrRichardSsSamuel,SiegfriedTtTheodorUuUlrichVvViktorWwWilhelmXxXanthippe,XavierYyYpsilonZzZacharias,Zürich
Special letters German has four special letters; three are vowels accented with an umlaut sign () and one is derived from a ligature of (long s) and (; called "ess-zed/zee" or "sharp s"). They have their own names separate from the letters they are based on.
LetterNameName(IPA)SpellingAlphabetÄäÄÄrgerÖöÖÖkonom,ÖsterreichÜüÜÜbermut,Übelẞß,Eszett,scharfes S
Capital ẞ was declared an official letter of the German alphabet on 29 June 2017.Official rules of German spelling updated, Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, 29 June 2017, retrieved 29 June 2017. Previously represented as . Historically, long s (ſ) was used as well, as in English and many other European languages.Andrew West (2006): "The Rules for Long S".
While the Council for German Orthography considers distinct letters, disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (considering special letters as variants of ) and 30 (counting all special letters separately).
Use of special letters Umlaut diacritic usage
The accented letters are used to indicate the presence of umlauts (fronting of back vowels). Before the introduction of the printing press, frontalization was indicated by placing an after the back vowel to be modified, but German printers developed the space-saving typographical convention of replacing the full with a small version placed above the vowel to be modified. In German Kurrent writing, the superscripted was simplified to two vertical dashes (as the Kurrent consists largely of two short vertical strokes), which have further been reduced to dots in both handwriting and German typesetting. Although the two dots of umlaut look like those in the diaeresis (trema), the two have different origins and functions.
When it is not possible to use the umlauts (for example, when using a restricted character set) the characters should be transcribed as respectively, following the earlier postvocalic- convention; simply using the base vowel (e.g., instead of ) would be wrong and misleading. However, such transcription should be avoided if possible, especially with names. Names often exist in different variants, such as and , and with such transcriptions in use one could not work out the correct spelling of the name.
Automatic back-transcribing is wrong not only for names. Consider, for example, ("the new book"). This should never be changed to , as the second is completely separate from the and does not even belong in the same syllable; () is (the root for "new") followed by , an inflection. The word does not exist in German.
Furthermore, in northern and western Germany, there are family names and place names in which lengthens the preceding vowel (by acting as a ), as in the former Dutch orthography, such as , which is pronounced with a long , not an . Similar cases are and .
In proper names and ethnonyms, there may also appear a rare and , which are not letters with an umlaut, but a diaeresis, used as in French and English to distinguish what could be a digraph, for example, in , in , in , in and (although Hoëcker added the diaeresis himself), and in .Die Erde: Haack Kleiner Atlas; VEB Hermann Haack geographisch-kartographische Anstalt, Gotha, 1982; pages: 97, 100, 153, 278 Occasionally, a diaeresis may be used in some well-known names, i.e.: Italien: Straßenatlas 1:300.000 mit Ortsregister; Kunth Verlag GmbH & Co. KG 2016/2017; München; page: III (usually written as ).
Swiss keyboards and typewriters do not allow easy input of uppercase letters with umlauts (nor ) because their positions are taken by the most frequent French diacritics. Uppercase umlauts were dropped because they are less common than lowercase ones (especially in Switzerland). Geographical names in particular are supposed to be written with plus , except . The omission can cause some inconvenience, since the first letter of every noun is capitalized in German.
Unlike in Hungarian, the exact shape of the umlaut diacritics – especially when handwritten – is not important, because they are the only ones in the language (not counting the tittle on and ). They will be understood whether they look like dots (), acute accents () or vertical bars (). A horizontal bar (macron, ), a breve (), a tiny or , a tilde (), and such variations are often used in stylized writing (e.g., logos). However, the breve – or the ring () – was traditionally used in some scripts to distinguish a from an . In rare cases, the was underlined. The breved was common in some Kurrent-derived handwritings; it was mandatory in Sütterlin.
Sharp s
or () represents the "s" sound. In the current orthography, the letter is used only after long vowels and diphthongs. Prior to the German spelling reform of 1996, it was used additionally whenever the letter combination occurred at the end of a syllable or word. It is not used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
As derives from a ligature of lowercase letters, it is exclusively used in the middle or at the end of a word. The proper transcription when it cannot be used is ( and in earlier times). This transcription can give rise to ambiguities, albeit rarely; one such case is "in moderation" vs. "in large amounts". In all-caps, is replaced by or, optionally, by the uppercase . The uppercase was included in Unicode 5.1 as U+1E9E in 2008. Since 2010 its use is mandatory in official documentation in Germany when writing geographical names in all-caps. Empfehlungen und Hinweise für die Schreibweise geographischer Namen, 5. Ausgabe 2010 The option of using the uppercase in all-caps was officially added to the German orthography in 2017. Rechtschreibrat führt neuen Buchstaben ein, Die Zeit, 29 June 2017, retrieved 29 June 2017.
Sorting There are three ways to deal with the umlauts in alphabetic sorting. Treat them like their base characters, as if the umlaut were not present (DIN 5007-1, section 6.1.1.4.1). This is the preferred method for dictionaries, where umlauted words ( "feet") should appear near their origin words ( "foot"). In words which are the same except for one having an umlaut and one its base character (e.g., vs. ), the word with the base character gets precedence. Decompose them (invisibly) to vowel plus (DIN 5007-2, section 6.1.1.4.2). This is often preferred for personal and geographical names, wherein the characters are used unsystematically, as in German telephone directories (). They are treated like extra letters either placed after their base letters (Austrian phone books have between and etc.) or at the end of the alphabet (as in Swedish or in extended ASCII). Microsoft Windows in German versions offers the choice between the first two variants in its internationalization settings.
A sort of combination of nos. 1 and 2 also exists, in use in a couple of lexica: The umlaut is sorted with the base character, but an in proper names is sorted with the umlaut if it is actually spoken that way (with the umlaut getting immediate precedence). A possible sequence of names then would be in this order.
is sorted as though it were . Occasionally it is treated as , but this is generally considered incorrect. Words distinguished only by vs. are rare. The word with gets precedence, and (story of a building; South German pronunciation) would be sorted before Geschoss (projectile).
Accents in French loanwords are always ignored in collation.
In rare contexts (e.g., in older indices) (phonetic value equal to English ) and likewise and are treated as single letters, but the vocalic digraphs (historically ), and the historic never are.
Personal names with special characters German names containing umlauts () and/or are spelled in the correct way in the non-machine-readable zone of the passport, but with and/or in the machine-readable zone, e.g. becomes , becomes , and becomes . The transcription mentioned above is generally used for aircraft tickets et cetera, but sometimes (like in US visas) simple vowels are used (). As a result, passport, visa, and aircraft ticket may display different spellings of the same name. The three possible spelling variants of the same name (e.g., ) in different documents sometimes lead to confusion, and the use of two different spellings within the same document may give persons unfamiliar with German orthography the impression that the document is a forgery.
Even before the introduction of the capital , it was recommended to use the minuscule as a capital letter in family names in documents (e.g., , today's spelling: ).
German naming law accepts umlauts and/or in family names as a reason for an official name change. Even a spelling change, e.g. from to or from to is regarded as a name change.
Features of German spelling
Capitalization A typical feature of German spelling is the general capitalization of nouns and of most nominalized words. In addition, capital letters are used: at the beginning of sentences (may be used after a colon, when the part of a sentence after the colon can be treated as a sentence); in the formal pronoun 'you' and the determiner 'your' (optionally in other second-person pronouns in letters); in adjectives at the beginning of proper names (e.g., 'the Pacific Ocean'); in adjectives with the suffix '-er' from geographical names (e.g., ); in adjectives with the suffix '-sch' from proper names if written with the apostrophe before the suffix (e.g., 'Ohm's law', also written ).
Compound words Compound words, including nouns, are usually written together, e.g., ( + ; 'house door'), ( + ; 'table lamp'), ( + + ; 'cold water tap/faucet). This can lead to long words: the longest word in regular use, (according to the Guinness Book of Records) ('legal protection insurance companies'), consists of 39 letters.
Hyphen in compound words Compounds involving letters, abbreviations, or numbers (written in figures, even with added suffixes) are hyphenated: 'A major', 'US embassy', 'with 10 percent', 'group of ten'. The hyphen is used when adding suffixes to letters: 'nth'. It is used in substantivated compounds such as