German words for every day: days, months, numbers, greetings, IPA

How German words are written and pronounced

• DeutschGerman Latin script
• Straßestreet with Eszett
• STRAẞESTREET capital Eszett, since 2017

German is written in the Latin alphabet: the 26 letters of English plus the umlauts ä, ö and ü and the Eszett ß, the sharp s. A capital Eszett, ẞ, has been allowed since 2017, when the Council for German Orthography accepted it as an alternative to SS in words written in capitals. The German alphabet on this site lists all of them with the older Fraktur forms.

The rule that strikes learners first is the capital letter. German writes every noun with a capital, so German words for days and months (Montag, März) are capitalised as nouns, while the adverbs built from them (montags) are not. English Wikipedia's article on the language notes that this convention is almost unique to German today, shared perhaps only by Luxembourgish.

German is spoken as a mother tongue by nearly 100 million people, according to the same article, and taught as a foreign language more widely than any other in continental Europe after English and French. Its standard form has national varieties: Austria says Jänner for January and Grüß Gott for hello, Switzerland says Grüezi. The topic pages below mark each such variant where it matters.

For comparison with English, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages and Yiddish, the Germanic word list sets 243 German words beside their relatives. The days of the week and months tables put German among more than 300 languages.

Countries where German is an official language

German is the official language of six countries, all in central and western Europe: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium. In Switzerland it shares the role with French, Italian and Romansh, in Luxembourg with Luxembourgish and French, and in Belgium with Dutch and French. These six countries and the Italian province of South Tyrol, an autonomous region of Italy, make up what Wikipedia calls the German Sprachraum, the German language area.

Outside that area, Wikipedia's list of German-speaking territories records other recognised roles: a national language in Namibia, a minority language in Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The country pages on this site give each state's name in German next to its own languages, so Switzerland appears as die Schweiz and Belgium as Belgien.

The German words on these pages follow the standard language of Germany unless a note says otherwise. Where Austria or Switzerland differ in a basic word, both forms are given.