Almost all applications support German accents. Guidelines for typing and using accents are given below. If you need to refer to additional characters, look under the Accents section. Thanks to Franz Nagel for his technical assistance.
See Also: Germanic Languages
There are three types of "German" which are really three distinct languages. The form most familiar to Americans is probably High German (Hochdeutsch), which is the standard form of German used in Germany and Austria. The name refers to the fact that it originated in the Alps, versus other forms which originated from the lowlands. Note that Pennsylvania Dutch, spoken in the Amish community and elsewhere, is a High German dialect.
The form of German used in Switzerland, sometimes called Alemannisch, is also a "High German" (Alpine) form, but differs significantly from standard High German.
Low German (Plattdeutsch) refers to the group of Germanic languages coming from coastal Europe (lowlands), particularly Saxony. However, this branch of Germanic also includes English, Dutch, Afrikaans and Frisian although English is no longer mutually intelligible with other Germanic languages on the continent of Europe.
In Windows, combinations of the ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a non-English character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available. Additional options for entering accents in Windows are also listed in the Accents section of this Web site.
Note: The letters ü, ö, ä and ß can be replaced by "ue", "oe", "ae" or "ss" respectively.
| Sym | Windows ALT Code |
|---|---|
| Ä | ALT+0196 |
| ä | ALT+0228 |
| Ö | ALT+0214 |
| ö | ALT+0246 |
| Ü | ALT+0220 |
| ü | ALT+0252 |
| ß | ALT+0223 |
| € | ALT+0128 |
In order to use these codes you must activate the international keyboard. Instructions are listed in the Keyboards section of this Web site.
| Accent | Code |
|---|---|
| Umlaut Accent | ("+V) - Type double quote, then the vowel. |
| ß | Type RightAlt+S. |
| € | Type RightAlt+5. |
If you wish to simulate a non U.S. keyboard, follow the instructions for Activating Keyboard Locales to activate and switch Microsoft keyboards.
See table below for codes.
| Accent | Code |
|---|---|
| Umlaut Accent | Type Option+U, then either a lower-case or upper-case vowel. |
| ß | Type Option+S. |
| € | Type Shift+Option+2.(May not work for all fonts) |
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type Müller, you would type Müller.
The numbers in parentheses are the numeric codes assigned in Unicode encoding. For instance, because ü is number 252, Müller can also be used to input Müller. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
Note: The letters ü, ö, ä and ß can be replaced by "ue", "oe", "ae" or "ss" respectively.
| Sym | Entity Code |
|---|---|
| Ä | Ä (196) |
| ä | ä (228) |
| Ö | Ö (214) |
| ö | ö (246) |
| Ü | Ü (220) |
| ü | ü (252) |
| ß | ß (223) |
| € | € |
Many modern texts use American style quotes, but if you wish to include European style quote marks, here are the codes. Note that these codes may not work in older browsers.
| Sym | HTMl Entity Code |
|---|---|
| « | « (left angle) |
| » | » (right angle) | ‹ | ‹ (left single angle) |
| › | › (right single angle) | „ | „(bottom quote) | ‚ | ‚(single bottom quote) | “ | “(left curly quote) | ‘ | ‘(left single curly quote) | ” | ”(right curly quote) | ’ | ’(right single curly quote) | – | – (en dash) |
| — | — (em dash) |
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
See the German language tag section for a list of all codes.
For most purposes, the language code is de but if you have specific needs, then these additional codes can be used. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on how to implement these in HTML.
The following country codes are recognized by Microsoft products.
These codes refer to spelling system changes and are registered with the IANA Language Subtag Registry (but not implemented everywhere).
These three-letter codes are meant for linguists specializing in Germanic languages. Codes are based on the SIL Ethnologue. For Web pages, the combinations of de-country code are also recommended.
See the Dutch page for additional codes
Some content in German.
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