The German Alphabet and Umlauts (ä, ö, ü, ß)

Level: A1 (beginner). The German alphabet is the same 26 Latin letters you already know, plus four special ones: the umlauts ä, ö, ü and the ß. Learn the letter names and you can spell your name on the phone, read a sign, and follow the rest of the course.

By the end of this page you can…

…name every German letter, spell a word aloud, and use the umlauts and ß correctly — including the ae / oe / ue swap when you cannot type the dots.

The 26 base letters

German uses the full Latin alphabet, A to Z. What changes is the names of the letters, which you need when spelling aloud. The ones English speakers get wrong most often:

The vowel names line up neatly: A = “ah”, E = “ay”, I = “ee”, O = “oh”, U = “oo”. The trap is the pair V (“fow”) and W (“vay”): they feel swapped to an English speaker, because German w sounds like English v.

The four special letters

The three umlauts (ä, ö, ü) are full letters, not accents you can ignore. When a keyboard cannot produce the dots, write them as ae, oe, ue — Müller becomes Mueller, schön becomes schoen. Just dropping the dots (writing schon for schön) is wrong and changes the word.

The ß (Eszett, also called scharfes S) is a single letter that spells a sharp “s”. Two rules make it easy:

• It appears only after a long vowel or a diphthong — Straße (street), weiß (white), groß (big). After a short vowel you write ss instead — Wasser, muss.
• It never starts a word, so there is no capital ß at the beginning of anything. In all-capitals it becomes SS, or the capital ẞ, which was made an official letter in 2017.

How to say it

Four sounds decide whether your spelling sounds German:

• ä — the “e” in bet: Mädchen (girl).
• ö — say “oh”, then “eh” with rounded lips: schön (beautiful).
• ü — say “oo”, then “ee” with rounded lips: über (over), für (for).
• ß — a short, sharp “s” (never a buzzing “z”): Straße (street), weiß (white).

Example words

Spelling a word aloud

To spell Müller on the phone you say: “em – u-Umlaut (or u-e) – el – el – e – er”. For groß: “ge – er – o – Eszett”. Germans often use first names as a spelling alphabet — Anton, Berta, Cäsar… — but letter names alone are enough at A1.

Quick recap before the quiz.

Practice

Quiz

Next

• Get the sounds in order: German pronunciation overview
• Start the course: Start Learning German Here
• Your first grammar: Der, Die, Das and the German grammar section