The German Writing System

The German writing system is based on the 26-letter Latin alphabet. The letter y is used mostly in loan words, but can also be found in the names of places. The letters k and w are only found in loan words.1

Like Portuguese and its inconsistent writing systems for Portugal and Brazil, German has had a history of orthographic problems, which come out of the conflict between its essentially eight hundred year old writing system and its modern phonology.2 In other words, the conservative spelling rules for German are simply out of touch with its modern pronunciation, and, as a result, it is almost impossible to determine the spelling of a word solely based on its sound (on the other hand, one can generally determine sound based on spelling in German). There have been a few attempts to reform German spelling over the centuries, but little progress has been made so far.

The German writing system uses five diacritic or accent marks with its alphabet (the circumflex accent [à, è, ù], acute accent [é], grave accent [â, ê, î, ô û], dieresis [ë, ï], and cedilla [ç]) and two ligatures (æ and œ). The accent marks create phonetic, semantic, or etymological meanings for words; while the ligatures æ and œ are obligatory contractions of ae and oe in certain German words.

For additional information on the German writing system, you can check out the following resources on the Web at:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/German.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Language

For information on The German Writing System, please see our Quick Facts Library.

1 "German (Français)" Omniglot: A Guide to Writing Systems
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/German.htm
[Accessed December 12, 2004]

2 "Romance languages" Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=74739
[Accessed December 11, 2004]

3 "German Language" Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Language#Writing_system
[Accessed December 11, 2004]