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

Umlaut diacritic usage
The diacritic letters ä, ö, and ü 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 e after the back vowel to be modified, but

This section lists German letters and letter combinations, and how to pronounce them transliterated into the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Middle Ages
The oldest known German texts date back to the 8th century. They were written mainly in monasteries in different local dialects of Old High German. In these texts, the letter z along with combinations such as tz, cz, zz, sz or zs

There are three ways to deal with the umlauts in alphabetic sorting.
1. Treat them like their base characters, as if the umlaut were not present (DIN 5007-1, section 6.1.1.4.1). This is

Spelling of nouns
A typical feature of German spelling is the general capitalization of nouns and of most nominalized words.
Compound words, including nouns, are written together, e.g. Haustür (Haus + Tür; "house door"), Tischlampe

• Binnen-I, a convention for gender-neutral language in German
• German braille
• Non-English usage of quotation marks
• German phonology