German Letters & Umlauts

German is written with the Latin alphabet from A a to Z z, in the same order as English, and adds four letters: ä, ö, ü and ß. Together that makes the 30 letters German children learn at school. Dictionaries do not give the extra letters a place of their own: ä is filed with a, ö with o, ü with u, and ß as if it were ss. Telephone books and name lists often go the other way and sort ä as ae, so that Müller stands next to Mueller.

The most visible rule of German spelling has nothing to do with special letters: every noun starts with a capital. Der Hund, die Straße, das Frühstück, and also nouns made from other words, das Schöne, beim Essen. That is why capital umlauts come up all the time: Äpfel, Österreich, Übung, Ärger.

C, Q, X and Y are mostly found in loanwords and names, and C usually appears inside the combinations ch, ck and sch: ich, Brücke, schön. On a German keyboard the Y and Z keys are swapped compared with English, which is why the layout is called QWERTZ.

German umlauts: what Ä, Ö and Ü do

The two dots on ä, ö and ü are the umlaut. They change the sound of the vowel: ä is close to the e of bed (or the ai of fair when long), ö is said like e with rounded lips, and ü like i with rounded lips, as in French tu. The dots matter for meaning: schon means 'already' and schön 'beautiful'; zahlen is 'to pay', zählen 'to count'; drucken is 'to print', drücken 'to press'. Umlauts also make many plurals: Apfel, Äpfel; Mutter, Mütter; Bruder, Brüder.

The dots started out as a small e written above the vowel in old German handwriting, which shrank over the centuries into two strokes. That history is why ae, oe and ue are the accepted replacements when the real letters are unavailable, in e-mail addresses, web domains, the machine-readable lines of passports and on plane tickets: Muenchen for München. Some family names, like Goethe, have kept the oe for good. Ordinary German text always uses ä ö ü; writing Koln without the dots or the e is simply wrong.

German also has the combination äu, which sounds like the oi of oil: Häuser (houses), Fräulein, läuten. The dotted letters of German are the same Unicode characters as the trema in Dutch België or English naïve, but German uses the dots to change a sound, not to split syllables.

The Eszett: ß and the capital ẞ

ß, called Eszett or scharfes S (sharp s), stands for a voiceless s sound. It grew out of a ligature of the old long s ſ with z or with s, and its name literally spells 's-z'. Since the 1996 spelling reform the rule is simple: ß after a long vowel or a diphthong, ss after a short vowel. So Straße, groß, Fuß and heißen, but Fluss, Kuss, muss and dass (which were Fluß and daß before the reform). The difference can change a word: Maße are measurements, Masse is a mass, and in Maßen (in moderation) is the opposite of in Massen (in masses).

For centuries ß had no capital, and words written in capitals simply used SS: STRASSE. A capital ẞ was added to Unicode in 2008 as U+1E9E, and in 2017 the Council for German Orthography officially allowed it, so STRAẞE is now correct too, while SS remains the more common choice. Because ß never begins a word, the capital is needed only in all-caps text such as signs, passports and headlines.

Switzerland and Liechtenstein do not use ß at all. Swiss Standard German writes ss everywhere, Strasse, gross, Fuss, and Swiss keyboards have no ß key. Austrian and German spelling keep it.

German quotation marks and other punctuation

German quotation marks open low and close high: „so“. The opening mark „ sits low like two commas, and the closing mark is “, the shape English uses to open a quote, often remembered as '99 below, 66 above'. Quotes inside quotes take the single versions ‚so‘. Many German books and magazines use guillemets pointing inward instead, »so«, with ›so‹ for inner quotes. In Switzerland and Liechtenstein the guillemets point outward, «so», as in French but without the spaces.

The apostrophe ’ marks dropped letters, as in Wie geht’s? and Ich hab’s. The Gedankenstrich, the thought dash, is an en dash with spaces around it – exactly like this – rather than the long unspaced dash of American English. And § is an everyday sign in German: it is called Paragraph, laws are cited with it (§ 433 BGB), and it has its own key, Shift+3, on German keyboards.

How to type German letters on a keyboard

On a German or Austrian keyboard ä, ö, ü and ß have their own keys, and € is AltGr+E. On an English keyboard, Windows users can switch on the US-International layout: press " and then a, o or u for ä ö ü, and Right Alt+S for ß. On a Mac, press Option+U and then the vowel for ä ö ü Ä Ö Ü, Option+S for ß, and Option+Shift+W for „. On iPhone and Android, hold down a, o, u or s and slide to the letter you need.

With any Windows layout you can hold Alt and type on the number pad: Alt+0228 ä, Alt+0246 ö, Alt+0252 ü, Alt+0196 Ä, Alt+0214 Ö, Alt+0220 Ü, Alt+0223 ß, Alt+0132 „, Alt+0147 “, Alt+0130 ‚, Alt+0145 ‘, Alt+0187 », Alt+0171 «, Alt+0150 –, Alt+0167 § and Alt+0128 €. The capital ẞ has no Alt code of that kind; in Word type 1E9E and press Alt+X. In HTML use ä ö ü Ä ß ẞ (ẞ) „ “ and §, or simply copy the letters from this page.

Where German is spoken, and its currency signs

German has around 95 million native speakers, and CLDR estimates that about 140 million people speak it in all, many of them as a second language in the Netherlands, Poland and elsewhere. It is the official language of Germany 🇩🇪 (about 77 million speakers by CLDR's estimate), Austria 🇦🇹 (about 8.7 million) and Liechtenstein 🇱🇮, one of the four national languages of Switzerland 🇨🇭, an official language of Luxembourg 🇱🇺 beside Luxembourgish and French, and of Belgium 🇧🇪, where a small German-speaking community lives in the east around Eupen. In Italy 🇮🇹 it is co-official in South Tyrol. Outside Europe, German-speaking communities live in Brazil, with one estimate of about 3 million Hunsrik speakers, and in Argentina, Namibia, Paraguay and the United States.

Germany, Austria, Belgium and Luxembourg pay in euros. In Germany the sign usually follows the amount, with a decimal comma: 2,50 €; Austrians often put it first, € 2,50. Switzerland and Liechtenstein use the Swiss franc, written CHF or Fr., which has no symbol of its own. The ℳ in Unicode is a reminder of an older German money: before the Second World War this script M was the sign of the German Mark on price lists and in books.

Closely related languages have collections of their own: Swiss German, Luxembourgish, Low German, Yiddish and Dutch. For the flags, food and other emoji of each country, see the Germany, Austria and Switzerland collections.