The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.
In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc.
Contents |
| Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
| Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z |
The German language additionally uses three letters with diacritics:
and one ligature:
Although the diacritic letters represent distinct sounds in German phonology, they are almost universally not considered to be part of the alphabet. Almost all German speakers consider the alphabet to have the 26 cardinal letters above and will name only those when asked to say the alphabet.
The diacritic letters ä, ö and ü are used to indicate umlauts. They originated as a, o, u with a superscripted e, which in German Kurrent writing was written as two vertical dashes. These two dashes have degenerated to dots and look like a diaeresis (trema), but a distinction should be made because the two serve different purposes.
When it is not possible to use the umlauts, for example, when using a restricted character set, the umlauts Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö and ü should be transcribed as Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe and ue, respectively; simply using the base vowel (e.g. u instead of ü) would be erroneous and be prone to producing ambiguities.
Nevertheless, any such transcription should be avoided when possible, especially with names. Names often exist in a variant that uses this style such as "Müller" and "Mueller". In a text that uses this transcription system, it would be obvious that if a person's occupation is given as "Mueller" (a miller), it should actually be spelt "Müller", but for a person whose name is given as "Mueller", there would be no way to tell if the name needs to be back-transcribed or not.
Automatic back-transcribing is not only harmful for names. Consider, for example, "das neue Buch" (the new book). This should never be changed into "das neü Buch". Technically, the second e has no connection with the u at all: neue is neu (the root for new) followed by an e, the neuter suffix. The word neü does not exist in German.
Furthermore, in northern and western Germany, there are family names and place names where e lengthens the preceding vowel, as in Straelen, which is pronounced with a long a, not an ä. Similar cases are Coesfeld and Bernkastel-Kues.
In proper names, there may also appear a rare ë, which is not an umlaut, but a diaeresis to distinguish what could be a digraph as in French, like ie in Ferdinand Piëch or like oe in Bernhard Hoëcker (although, in the latter case, he himself added the diaeresis).
Swiss typewriters and computer keyboards do not allow easy input of uppercase umlauts (nor ß) for their positions are taken by the most frequent French diacritics. The decision to drop the uppercase umlauts is due to the fact that uppercase umlauts are less common than lowercase ones (especially in Switzerland). Geographical names in particular are supposed to be written with A, O, U plus e except "Österreich" (Austria). This can cause some inconvenience since the first letter of every noun is capitalized in German.
Unlike in some other languages (such as Hungarian), the actual form of the umlaut diacritics, especially when handwritten, is not all that important, because they are the only ones of the language (except for the dot on i and j). They might look like dots ( ¨ ), acute accents ( ̋ ), vertical bars ( ̎ ), a horizontal bar (macron, ¯ ), a breve ( ˘ ),[1] a tiny N, a tilde ( ˜ ), etc.
Also, the eszett or scharfes S (ß) is used. It existed only in a lowercase version since it can never occur at the beginning of a word (there are a few loan words starting with an s followed by a z (e.g. Szegediner Krautfleisch or Szene, but that is not the same as the eszett which counts as one letter).
In all caps it is usually converted to SS, while in Switzerland and Liechtenstein ß is not used at all, but ss instead. This gives rise to ambiguities, albeit extremely rarely; the most commonly cited such case is that of "in Maßen" (in moderation) vs. in Massen (en masse). For all caps usage, an uppercase ß had been postulated since 1879 and was officially introduced in 2008 into Unicode 5.1 as U+1E9E (HTML: ẞ), although a definite form hasn't been found yet.
Regulations introduced as part of the German spelling reform of 1996 reduced usage of this letter for Germany and Austria (see ß). Although nowadays substituted correctly only by ss, the letter actually originates from two distinct ligatures (depending on word and spelling rules): long s with round s ("ſs") and long s with (round) z ("ſz"/"ſʒ"). Some people therefore prefer to substitute "ß" by "sz". By official rules this is incorrect, but can avoid possible ambiguities (as in the aforementioned "Maßen" vs "Massen" example).
Incorrect use of the "ß" letter is a very common source of spelling errors even among native German speakers. Although the spelling reform of 1996 was meant to simplify the rules concerning "ß" and "ss", it also caused considerable confusion, even to the point that some people incorrectly assumed that the "ß" had been abolished completely.
In Fraktur typeface and similar scripts a long s (ſ ) is used except for syllable endings (cf. Greek sigma) and sometimes this has been historically used in antiqua fonts as well, but in general it went out of use in the early 1940s along with Fraktur typeface. An example where this convention would help disambiguation is “Wachstube”, which was either written “Wachſtube” = “Wach-Stube” (mil. guard-house) or “Wachstube” = “Wachs-Tube” (tube of wax).
In loan words from the French language spelling and diacritics are usually preserved (e.g., café in the meaning of coffeehouse). For this reason German typewriters and computer keyboards offer two dead keys, one for accent grave and acute and one for circumflex (`, ´ and ^). Other letters occur less often, like ç in loan words from French or Portuguese, or ñ in loan words from Spanish.
There are three ways to deal with the umlauts in alphabetic sorting.
Microsoft Windows in German versions offers the choice between the first two variants in its internationalisation settings.
Eszett is sorted as though it were ss. Occasionally it is treated as s, but this is generally considered incorrect. It is not used at all in Switzerland.
Accents in French loan words are always ignored in collation.
In rare contexts (e. g. in older indices) sch (equal to English sh) and likewise st and ch are treated as single letters, but the vocalic digraphs ai, ei (historically ay, ey), au, äu, eu and the historic ui and oi never are.
There is a German spelling alphabet similar to the ICAO spelling alphabet. The official version in Germany, laid down in DIN 5009, is as follows:
The spelling alphabet was changed several times during the 20th century, in some cases for political reasons. In 1934, supposedly "Jewish" names were replaced. Thus, David, Jakob, Nathan, Samuel and Zacharias became Dora, Jot, Nordpol, Siegfried and Zeppelin. In Germany, the 1948 and 1950 versions reverted to some of the old versions but introduced additional changes. Many of the older, officially obsolete forms are still found in popular use, in particular Siegfried and Zeppelin. Some letter names are still official in Austria. The official Austrian version, as laid down in ÖNORM A 1081, differs from DIN 5009 in the following places:
Konrad is also used in Germany, although this is not and apparently never was official there. Konrad can cause confusion since the first name "Conrad" (spelled with a "C") also exists. Not following the norm, but not uncommon are CHristine, Norbert and Zeppelin – especially in Austria.
In Switzerland and Liechtenstein yet another slightly different spelling alphabet is used.