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

(Listen to a German speaker cite the alphabet in German.)

Contents

1 Rare letters 2 Extra letters 2.1 Umlauts 2.2 Sharp s 2.3 French 2.4 Sorting 3 Phonetic alphabet

Rare letters

• Except for the common sequences sch (/ʃ/), ch (/χ/ or /ç/) and ck (/k/) the letter c only appears in loan words, if it had not been replaced by k or z already.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 (/kv/).
• The letter y (Ypsilon, /'ʏpsilɔn/) occurs only in loan words in German, 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, /ɪks/) occurs almost only in loan words in German. Natively German words that are pronounced with a /ks/ sound are usually written 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)

(Listen to a German speaker naming these letters)

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 ß can be transcribed as ss. 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.

Uppercase umlauts are not used as much as lowercase ones, e.g. many people write Oel instead of Öl (oil). Geographical names in particular are often required to be written with A, O, U plus e—despite "Österreich" (Austria). 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.

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. In all caps it must be converted to SS, although there had been efforts to create a distinct ligature and some people use SZ. Regularisations introduced as part of the German spelling reform of 1996 greatly reduced the occurrence of this letter. In Switzerland ß is not used, but ss instead. In fraktur script 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.

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, Greek and English being the main sources).

Sorting

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

1. Treat them like their base characters, as if the dots were not present. This is the standardised (by DIN) and preferred method for dictionaries, where umlauted words ("Füße", feet) should appear near their origin words ("Fuß", foot).
2. Decompose them (invisibly) 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 after their base letters or even at the end of the alphabet. Austrian phone books have ä between a and b, etc.

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) is treated as a trigraph and likewise ch as a digraph, but the diphtongs ai, ei (historically ay, ey), au, äu, eu and the rare ui and oi' never are.

Phonetic alphabet

There is a German equivalent to the English-language NATO phonetic alphabet:

Anton, Berta, Cäsar, Dora, Emil, Friedrich, Gustav, Heinrich, Ida, Jaguar, Konrad, Ludwig, Martha, Nordpol (sometimes Norbert), Otto, Paula, Qual, Richard, Siegfried (sometimes Südpol), Theodor, Ulrich, Viktor, Wilhelm, Xaver, Ypsilon, Zeppelin; Ärger, Österreich, Übermut.de:Deutsches Alphabet