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
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.
Capital ẞ was declared an official letter of the German alphabet on 29 June 2017. Previously represented as . Historically, long s (ſ) was used as well, as in English and many other European languages.
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 . Occasionally, a diaeresis may be used in some well-known names, i.e.: (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.