German orthography


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, German orthography is regulated by the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung, 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

¹in Germany
²in Austria
  1. In the spelling alphabet, for, Charlotte is used. For the trigraph, Schule is used.

    Special letters

German uses three letter-diacritic combinations using the umlaut and one ligature which are officially considered distinct letters of the alphabet.
Name Spelling alphabet
ÄäÄrger
ÖöÖkonom; in Austria Österreich
ÜüÜbermut; in Austria Übel
ẞßEszett:
scharfes S: 		Eszett; in Austria and Southern Germany Scharfes S

While the Council for German Orthography considers Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü, and ẞ/ß 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 and 30.

Use of special letters

Umlaut diacritic usage

The diacritic letters ä, ö, and ü are used to indicate the presence of umlauts. Before the introduction of the printing press, frontalization was indicated by placing an e after the back vowel to be modified, but German printers developed the space-saving typographical convention of replacing the full e with a small version placed [|above] the vowel to be modified. In German Kurrent writing, the superscripted e was simplified to two vertical dashes, 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, the two have different origins and functions.
When it is not possible to use the umlauts the characters Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö, ü should be transcribed as Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe, ue respectively, following the earlier postvocalic-e convention; simply using the base vowel would be wrong and misleading. However, such transcription should be avoided if possible, especially with names. Names often exist in different variants, such as "Müller" and "Mueller", and with such transcriptions in use one could not work out the correct spelling of the name.
Automatic back-transcribing is not only wrong for names. Consider, for example, das neue Buch. This should never be changed to das neü Buch, as the second e is completely separate from the u and does not even belong in the same syllable; neue is neu followed by an e, an inflection. The word neü does not exist in German.
Furthermore, in northern and western Germany, there are family names and place names in which e lengthens the preceding vowel, as in the former Dutch orthography, such as Straelen, which is pronounced with a long a, not an ä. Similar cases are Coesfeld and Bernkastel-Kues.
In proper names and ethnonyms, there may also appear a rare ë and ï, which are not letters with an umlaut, but a diaeresis, used as in French to distinguish what could be a digraph, for example, ai in Karaïmen, eu in Alëuten, ie in Ferdinand Piëch, oe in Clemens von Loë and Bernhard Hoëcker, and ue in Niuë. Occasionally, a diaeresis may be used in some well-known names, i.e.: Italiën. To separate the au diphthong, as well as some others, which are graphically composed of potentially umlaut-holding letters, the acute accent is sometimes used.
Swiss typewriters and computer keyboards do not allow easy input of uppercase letters with umlauts because their positions are taken by the most frequent French diacritics. Uppercase umlauts were dropped because they are less common than lowercase ones. Geographical names in particular are supposed to be written with A, O, U plus e except "Österreich". 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. They will be understood whether they look like dots, acute accents, vertical bars, a horizontal bar, a breve, a tiny N or e, a tilde, and such variations are often used in stylized writing. In the past, however, the breve was traditionally used in some scripts to distinguish a u from an n, as was the ring. In rare cases the n was underlined. The breved u was common in some Kurrent-derived handwritings; it was mandatory in Sütterlin.

Sharp s

The eszett or scharfes S represents the unvoiced s sound. The German spelling reform of 1996 somewhat reduced usage of this letter in Germany and Austria. It is not used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
As the ß 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 ss. This transcription can give rise to ambiguities, albeit rarely; one such case is in Maßen vs. in Massen. In all-caps, ß is replaced by SS or, optionally, by the uppercase ẞ. The uppercase ẞ 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. The option of using the uppercase ẞ in all-caps was officially added to the German orthography in 2017.
Although nowadays substituted correctly only by ss, the letter actually originates from two distinct ligatures : long s with round s and long s with z. Some people therefore prefer to substitute "ß" by "sz", as it can avoid possible ambiguities.
Incorrect use of the ß letter is a common type of spelling error even among native German writers. The spelling reform of 1996 changed the rules concerning ß and ss. This required a change of habits and is often disregarded: some people even incorrectly assumed that the "ß" had been abolished completely. However, if the vowel preceding the s is long, the correct spelling remains ß. If the vowel is short, it becomes ss, e.g. "Ich denke, :wikt:dass#German|dass…". This follows the general rule in German that a long vowel is followed by a single consonant, while a short vowel is followed by a double consonant.
This change towards the so-called Heyse spelling, however, introduced a new sort of spelling error, as the long/short pronunciation differs regionally. It was already mostly abolished in the late 19th century in favor of the Abel spelling that put focus on logical word ends. Besides the long/short pronunciation issue, which can be attributed to dialect speaking, Heyse spelling also introduces reading ambiguities that do not occur with Abel spelling such as Prozessorientierung vs. "Prozessorarchitektur". It is therefore recommended to insert hyphens where required for reading assistance, i.e. Prozessor-Architektur vs. Prozess-Orientierung. The use of hyphens here is, however, somewhat frowned upon as it is considered a dumbing down of the written language.

Long s

In the Fraktur typeface and similar scripts, a long s was used except in syllable endings and sometimes it was historically used in antiqua fonts as well; but it went out of general use in the early 1940s along with the Fraktur typeface. An example where this convention would avoid ambiguity is Wachstube, which was written either Wachſtube = Wach-Stube or Wachstube = Wachs-Tube.

Sorting

There are three ways to deal with the umlauts in alphabetic sorting.
  1. Treat them like their base characters, as if the umlaut were not present. This is the preferred method for dictionaries, where umlauted words should appear near their origin words. In words which are the same except for one having an umlaut and one its base character, the word with the base character gets precedence.
  2. Decompose them to vowel plus e. This is often preferred for personal and geographical names, wherein the characters are used unsystematically, as in German telephone directories.
  3. They are treated like extra letters either placed
  4. # after their base letters or
  5. # at the end of the alphabet.
Microsoft Windows in German versions offers the choice between the first two variants in its internationalisation 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 ae, oe, ue in proper names is sorted with the umlaut if it is actually spoken that way. A possible sequence of names then would be "Mukovic; Muller; Müller; Mueller; Multmann" in this order.
Eszett is sorted as though it were ss. Occasionally it is treated as s, but this is generally considered incorrect. Words distinguished only by ß vs. ss can only appear in the Heyse writing and are even then rare and possibly dependent on local pronunciation, but if they appear, the word with ß gets precedence, and Geschoß would be sorted before Geschoss.
Accents in French loanwords are always ignored in collation.
In rare contexts sch and likewise st and ch are treated as single letters, but the vocalic digraphs ai, ei, au, äu, eu and the historic ui and oi never are.

Person names with special characters

German names containing umlauts and/or ß are spelled in the correct way in the non-machine-readable zone of the passport, but with AE, OE, UE and/or SS in the machine-readable zone, e.g. Müller becomes MUELLER, Weiß becomes WEISS, and Gößmann becomes GOESSMANN. The transcription mentioned above is generally used for aircraft tickets et cetera, but sometimes 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 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 ẞ, it was recommended to use the minuscule ß as a capital letter in family names in documents.
German naming law accepts umlauts and/or ß in family names as a reason for an official name change. Even a spelling change, e.g. from Müller to Mueller or from Weiß to Weiss. is regarded as a name change.

Features of German spelling

Spelling of nouns

A typical feature of German spelling is the general capitalization of nouns and of most nominalized words.
Compound words, including nouns, are written together, e.g. Haustür, Tischlampe, Kaltwasserhahn. This can lead to long words: the longest word in regular use, Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, consists of 39 letters.

Vowel length

Even though vowel length is phonemic in German, it is not consistently represented. However, there are different ways of identifying long vowels:
Even though German does not have phonemic consonant length, there are many instances of doubled or even tripled consonants in the spelling. A single consonant following a checked vowel is doubled if another vowel follows, for instance immer 'always', lassen 'let'. These consonants are analyzed as ambisyllabic because they constitute not only the syllable onset of the second syllable but also the syllable coda of the first syllable, which must not be empty because the syllable nucleus is a checked vowel.
By analogy, if a word has one form with a doubled consonant, all forms of that word are written with a doubled consonant, even if they do not fulfill the conditions for consonant doubling; for instance, rennen 'to run' → er rennt 'he runs'; Küsse 'kisses' → Kuss 'kiss'.
Even though German does not have phonemic consonant length, long consonants can occur in composite words when the first part ends in the same consonant the second part starts with, e.g. in the word Schaffell.
Composite words can also have tripled letters. While this is usually a sign that the consonant is actually spoken long, it does not affect the pronunciation per se: the fff in Sauerstoffflasche is exactly as long as the ff in Schaffell. According to the spelling before 1996, the three consonants would be shortened before vowels, but retained before consonants and in hyphenation, so the word Schifffahrt was then written Schiffahrt, whereas Sauerstoffflasche already had a triple fff. With the aforementioned change in ß spelling, even a new source of triple consonants sss, which in pre-1996 spelling could not occur as it was rendered ßs, was introduced, e. g. Mussspiel.

Typical letters

For technical terms, the foreign spelling is often retained such as ph or y in the word Physik of Greek origin. For some common affixes however, like -graphie or Photo-, it is allowed to use -grafie or Foto- instead. Both Photographie and Fotografie are correct, but the mixed variants Fotographie or Photografie are not.
For other foreign words, both the foreign spelling and a revised German spelling are correct such as / Delfin or / Portmonee, though in the latter case the revised one does not usually occur.
For some words for which the Germanized form was common even before the reform of 1996, the foreign version is no longer allowed. A notable example is the word Foto, with the meaning “photograph”, which may no longer be spelled as Photo. Other examples are Telephon which was already Germanized as Telefon some decades ago or Bureau which got replaced by the Germanized version Büro even earlier.
Except for the common sequences sch, ch and ck the letter c appears only in loanwords or in proper nouns. In many loanwords, including most words of Latin origin, the letter c pronounced has been replaced by k. Alternatively, German words which come from Latin words with c before e, i, y, ae, oe are usually pronounced with and spelled with z. However, certain older spellings occasionally remain, mostly for decorative reasons, such as Circus instead of Zirkus.
The letter q in German appears only in the sequence qu except for loanwords such as Coq au vin or Qigong.
The letter x occurs almost exclusively in loanwords such as Xylofon and names, e.g. Alexander and Xanthippe. Native German words now pronounced with a sound are usually written using chs or ks, as with Fuchs. Some exceptions occur such as Hexe, Nixe, Axt and Xanten.
The letter y occurs almost exclusively in loanwords, especially words of Greek origin, but some such words have become so common that they are no longer perceived as foreign. It used to be more common in earlier centuries, and traces of this earlier usage persist in proper names. It is used either as an alternative letter for i, for instance in Mayer / Meyer, or especially in the Southwest, as a representation of that goes back to an old IJ, for instance in Schwyz or Schnyder. Another notable exception is Bayern and derived words like bayrisch ; this actually used to be spelt with an i until the King of Bavaria introduced the y as a sign of his philhellenism.
In loan words from the French language, spelling and accents are usually preserved. For instance, café in the sense of "coffeehouse" is always written Café in German; accentless Cafe would be considered erroneous, and the word cannot be written Kaffee, which means "coffee". Thus, German typewriters and computer keyboards offer two dead keys: one for the acute and grave accents and one for circumflex. Other letters occur less often such as ç in loan words from French or Portuguese, and ñ in loan words from Spanish.
In one curious instance, the word Ski is pronounced as if it were Schi all over the German-speaking areas, but only written that way in Austria.

Grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences

This section lists German letters and letter combinations, and how to pronounce them transliterated into the International Phonetic Alphabet. This is the pronunciation of Standard German. Note that the pronunciation of standard German varies slightly from region to region. In fact, it is possible to tell where most German speakers come from by their accent in standard German.
Foreign words are usually pronounced approximately as they are in the original language.

Consonants

Double consonants are pronounced as single consonants, except in compound words.

Short vowels

Consonants are sometimes doubled in writing to indicate the preceding vowel is to be pronounced as a short vowel. Most one-syllable words that end in a single consonant are pronounced with long vowels, but there are some exceptions such as an, das, es, in, mit, and von. The e in the ending -en is often silent, as in bitten "to ask, request". The ending -er is often pronounced, but in some regions, people say or. The e in the ending -el is pronounced short despite having just a single consonant on the end.
A vowel usually represents a long sound if the vowel in question occurs:
Long vowels are generally pronounced with greater tenseness than short vowels.
The long vowels map as follows:

Middle Ages

The oldest known German texts date back to the 8th century. They were written mainly in monasteries in different local dialects of Old High German. In these texts, the letter z along with combinations such as tz, cz, zz, sz or zs was chosen to transcribe the sounds and, which is ultimately the origin of the modern German letters z, tz and ß. After the Carolingian Renaissance, however, during the reigns of the Ottonian and Salian dynasties in the 10th century and 11th century, German was rarely written, the literary language being almost exclusively Latin.
Notker the German is a notable exception in his period: not only are his German compositions of high stylistic value, but his orthography is also the first to follow a strictly coherent system.
Significant production of German texts only resumed during the reign of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. Around the year 1200, there was a tendency towards a standardized Middle High German language and spelling for the first time, based on the Franconian-Swabian language of the Hohenstaufen court. However, that language was used only in the epic poetry and minnesang lyric of the knight culture. These early tendencies of standardization ceased in the interregnum after the death of the last Hohenstaufen king in 1254. Certain features of today's German orthography still date back to Middle High German: the use of the trigraph sch for and the occasional use of v for because around the 12th and 13th century, the prevocalic was voiced.
In the following centuries, the only variety that showed a marked tendency to be used across regions was the Middle Low German of the Hanseatic League, based on the variety of Lübeck and used in many areas of northern Germany and indeed northern Europe in general.

Early modern period

By the 16th century, a new interregional standard developed on the basis of the East Central German and Austro-Bavarian varieties. This was influenced by several factors:
Mid-16th century Counter-Reformation reintroduced Catholicism to Austria and Bavaria, prompting a rejection of the Lutheran language. Instead, a specific southern interregional language was used, based on the language of the Habsburg chancellery.
In northern Germany, the Lutheran East Central German replaced the Low German written language until the mid-17th century. In the early 18th century, the Lutheran standard was also introduced in the southern states and countries, Austria, Bavaria and Switzerland, due to the influence of northern German writers, grammarians such as Johann Christoph Gottsched or language cultivation societies such as the Fruitbearing Society.

19th century and early 20th century

Though, by the mid-18th century, one norm was generally established, there was no institutionalized standardization. Only with the introduction of compulsory education in late 18th and early 19th century was the spelling further standardized, though at first independently in each state because of the political fragmentation of Germany. Only the foundation of the German Empire in 1871 allowed for further standardization.
In 1876, the Prussian government instituted the to achieve a standardization for the entire German Empire. However, its results were rejected, notably by Prime Minister of Prussia Otto von Bismarck.
In 1880, Gymnasium director Konrad Duden published the Vollständiges Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, known simply as "the Duden". In the same year, the Duden was declared to be authoritative in Prussia. Since Prussia was, by far, the largest state in the German Empire, its regulations also influenced spelling elsewhere, for instance, in 1894, when Switzerland recognized the Duden.
In 1901, the interior minister of the German Empire instituted the Second Orthographic Conference. It declared the Duden to be authoritative, with a few innovations. In 1902, its results were approved by the governments of the German Empire, Austria and Switzerland.
In 1944, the Nazi German government planned a reform of the orthography, but because of World War II, it was never implemented.
After 1902, German spelling was essentially decided de facto by the editors of the Duden dictionaries. After World War II, this tradition was followed with two different centers: Mannheim in West Germany and Leipzig in East Germany. By the early 1950s, a few other publishing houses had begun to attack the Duden monopoly in the West by putting out their own dictionaries, which did not always hold to the "official" spellings prescribed by Duden. In response, the Ministers of Culture of the federal states in West Germany officially declared the Duden spellings to be binding as of November 1955.
The Duden editors used their power cautiously because they considered their primary task to be the documentation of usage, not the creation of rules. At the same time, however, they found themselves forced to make finer and finer distinctions in the production of German spelling rules, and each new print run introduced a few reformed spellings.

German spelling reform of 1996

German spelling and punctuation was changed in 1996 with the intent to simplify German orthography, and thus to make the language easier to learn, without substantially changing the rules familiar to users of the language. The rules of the new spelling concern correspondence between sounds and written letters, capitalisation, joined and separate words, hyphenated spellings, punctuation, and hyphenation at the end of a line. Place names and family names were excluded from the reform.
The reform was adopted initially by Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland, and later by Luxembourg as well.
The new orthography is mandatory only in schools. A 1998 decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany confirmed that there is no law on the spelling people use in daily life, so they can use the old or the new spelling. While the reform is not very popular in opinion polls, it has been adopted by all major dictionaries and the majority of publishing houses.