German alphabet

The German alphabet consists of the same 26 letters as the modern Latin alphabet:

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

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

(German alphabet.ogg)

Rare letters

Except for the common sequences sch (), ch (allophone: or ) and ck () the letter c only appears in loan words, if it had not been replaced by k or z already.
The letter q only ever appears in the sequence qu ().
The letter y (Ypsilon, ) occurs only in loan words, although some such words (e.g. Typ) have become so common that they are no longer perceived as foreign. It used to be more common in German orthography in earlier centuries, and traces of this earlier usage persist in proper names like Meyer (a common family name) or Bayern (Bavaria).
The letter x (Ix, ) occurs almost only in loan words. Natively German words that are now pronounced with a sound are usually written using chs or cks.

Extra letters

The German language additionally uses three diacritic letters and one ligature:

ä, ö, ü / Ä, Ö, Ü

ß (called es-zett or scharfes s)

(German extra letters.ogg)

Umlauts

Although the diacritic letters represent distinct sounds in German phonology, they are almost universally not considered part of the alphabet. Almost all German speakers consider the alphabet to have the 26 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.

When it is not possible to use the umlauts, e. g. when using a restricted character set, the umlauts Ä, Ö, Ü, ä, ö and ü can be transcribed as Ae, Oe, Ue, ae, oe and ue, respectively. The two dots (trema) are actually derived from a superscript lowercase E.

Nevertheless, any such transcription should be avoided when possible, especially with names. The reason for this is that names often exist in a variant which uses this style, e.g. "Müller" and "Mueller". In a text which uses this transcription system, it would be obvious that if a person's occupation is given as "Mueller" (a miller), that 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.

Swiss typewriters and computer keyboards do not allow easy input of uppercase umlauts (nor ß) for their position is 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 often written with A, O, U plus e — despite "Österreich" (Austria). This can cause some inconvenience since the first letter of every noun is normally capitalized in German.

Unlike other languages (e. g. Hungarian), the actual form of the umlaut diacritics, especially when handwritten, is not all that important, because they are the only ones (including the dot on i and j). They might look like dots (¨), acute accents ( ̋), vertical bars ( ̎), one horizontal bar/macron (¯), a brevis (˘), an N or tilde (˜) etc.

Sharp s

Also, the es-zett or scharfes s (ß) is used. It exists only in a lower-case version since it can never occur at the beginning of a word. (There are very few loan words starting with sz, e.g. Szegediner Krautfleisch.)

In all caps it is converted to SS, while in Switzerland 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). Regularisations introduced as part of the German spelling reform of 1996 simplified usage of this letter (see ß).

Although nowadays substituted correctly only by double s, 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, incorrectly by official rules, prefer to substitute every occurrence of ß by "sz".

Long s

In fraktur and similar scripts a long s (ſ) was 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.

French

In loan words from the French language spelling and diacritics are usually preserved, although some are Germanised. For this reason German typewriters and computer keyboards offer two dead keys, one for accent grave and acute and one for circumflex (`, ´ and ^). Diacritic marks from other languages are often discarded, but there are only few loan words from languages that use any (Latin, latinised Greek and English being the main sources).

Sorting

There are three ways to deal with the umlauts in alphabetic sorting.

Treat them like their base characters, as if the dots were not present (DIN 5007-1). This is the preferred method for dictionaries, where umlauted words ("Füße", feet) should appear near their origin words ("Fuß", foot).
Decompose them (invisibly) to vowel plus e (DIN 5007-2). This is often preferred for personal and geographical names, wherein the characters are used unsystematically, as in German telephone directories ("Müller, A.; Mueller, B.; Müller, C.").
They are treated like extra letters either placed
1. after their base letters—Austrian phone books have ä between a and b etc.—or
2. at the end of the alphabet (as in Swedish), which is very uncommon.

Microsoft Windows in German locale offers the choice between the first two variants in its internationalisation settings.

Eszett is sorted as though it was ss. Occasionally it is treated as s, but this is generally considered incorrect.

In rare contexts sch (equal to English sh) and likewise 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.

Phonetic alphabet

There is a German equivalent to the English-language NATO phonetic alphabet. The official version, laid down in DIN 5009, is as follows:

Anton, Berta, Cäsar, Dora, Emil, Friedrich, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Julius, Kaufmann, Ludwig, Martha, Nordpol, Otto, Paula, Quelle, Richard, Samuel, Theodor, Ulrich, Viktor, Wilhelm, Xanthippe, Ypsilon, Zacharias; Ärger, Ökonom, Übermut, CHarlotte, SCHule, Eszett.

The official Austrian and Swiss versions are somewhat different. The German 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. 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. Konrad is also used very often, although this was apparently never official in Germany (it is the official version in Austria).

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