The German Alphabet

What is different from English

• Four extra characters. ä, ö, ü and ß. The first three are ordinary vowels with a mark; the fourth is a letter English never had.
• Every noun is capitalised, wherever it appears in the sentence — das Haus, die Frage, der Tag. German is the only major language that still does this, and it is a genuine reading aid: capital letters mark the nouns in a long sentence for you.
• Spelling predicts pronunciation. Unlike English, German is close to phonetic: once you know the rules on this page, you can read a word you have never seen and say it correctly. The reverse — hearing a word and spelling it — is nearly as reliable.
• Nothing is silent except the h that marks a long vowel. Final consonants are pronounced, including the ones English drops.
• Final b, d and g harden. At the end of a word they become p, t and k: Tag sounds like "Tak", und like "unt", halb like "halp".

The umlauts — ä, ö and ü

An umlaut is not decoration. It is a different vowel, and swapping it for the plain letter changes the word:

The rounding is the whole difficulty, and it is muscular rather than mysterious: hold the tongue exactly where it was for "eh" or "ee" and move only the lips. If the tongue moves too, you get the plain vowel back.

Umlauts are also grammar. They mark a large share of plurals (der Vater → die Väter), most comparatives (alt → älter), and several verb forms (ich fahre → er fährt) — so hearing the difference is not a refinement, it is how you tell a singular from a plural.

Where they sort. A dictionary treats ä as a, so Bär sits between Bar and Barsch. Lists of names use the other convention and file it as ae. Both are standard; they are simply different jobs.

ß — the Eszett

Called Eszett ("s-z") or scharfes S ("sharp s"), and always pronounced as a plain, unvoiced s. It never begins a word. Since the 1996 spelling reform, choosing between ß and ss is mechanical:

• ß after a long vowel or a diphthong — Straße, groß, Fuß, heißen, weiß, draußen.
• ss after a short vowel — Wasser, müssen, dass, Fluss, essen, wissen.

So the letter tells you how to say the vowel before it, which is why Maße (measurements) and Masse (mass) are not the same word. Two more things worth knowing: Switzerland and Liechtenstein abolished ß altogether and write ss everywhere, and a capital ẞ was added to the official rules in 2017 — before that, all-caps text simply wrote STRASSE.

Letters that do not say what you expect

The rest of the alphabet behaves roughly as an English speaker would guess. These ten do not, and they account for most mispronunciation at A1:

The v/w pair is the one to over-drill: Wein is "vine" and viel is "feel", which is precisely the opposite of the English instinct.

Letter combinations

German writes several sounds with two or three letters. These are not exceptions to learn one word at a time — each is completely regular, and together they cover most of what makes written German look unpronounceable at first.

Two of these are worth extra attention. ei and ie are opposites and constantly confused: the rule is that the second letter is the one you say — ei is "eye", ie is "ee". And ch has two sounds decided purely by the vowel in front of it: after a, o, u, au it is rasped at the back of the throat (Buch), everywhere else it is soft and forward (ich).

Long vowel or short?

German vowel length is contrastive — it distinguishes words — and unlike English it is written down. Three signals, all reliable:

• Long when the vowel is followed by h (Jahr, sehen, ihm), when it is doubled (Haar, See, Boot), or when a single consonant follows (gut, Tag, Name). ie is always long.
• Short when two or more consonants follow (Mutter, kommen, Nacht, schnell). A doubled consonant does not double the sound — it shortens the vowel before it.
• And ß versus ss tells you the same thing, which is the practical reason the rule exists.

Spelling a word out loud

Asked to spell your name over the phone in Germany, you will hear — and be expected to use — the Buchstabiertafel: a fixed word for each letter, the equivalent of "alpha, bravo, charlie".

The table has an awkward history. Several of its original names were Jewish (David, Jacob, Nathan, Samuel, Zacharias) and were struck out in 1934; Samuel and Zacharias were restored after the war, while Dora, Julius and Nordpol stayed. In 2022 the standard was rewritten around city names instead — Aachen, Berlin, Chemnitz, Düsseldorf and so on — partly to leave that history behind. In daily life you will still mostly hear the names above.

Typing German characters

• macOS — Option+u, then the vowel, gives ä ö ü. Option+s gives ß.
• Windows — the US-International layout puts them on the quote and minus keys, or use Alt+0228 (ä), Alt+0246 (ö), Alt+0252 (ü), Alt+0223 (ß).
• Phones — hold down a, o, u or s and choose from the row that pops up.
• When you cannot — write ae, oe, ue and ss. That substitution is standard and understood. Dropping the mark and writing a plain a for ä is not — it spells a different word.