German orthography

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 pronunciation of almost every word can be derived from its spelling once the spelling rules are known, but the opposite is not generally the case. Today, Standard High German orthography is regulated by the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung (Council for German Orthography), composed of representatives from most German-speaking countries. Wikt:Appendix:German spelling alphabet The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus four special letters. 1in Germany 2in Austria German has four special letters; three are vowels accented with an umlaut sign () and one is derived from a ligature of (long s) and (; called Eszett "ess-zed/zee" or scharfes S "sharp s"), all of which are officially considered distinct letters of the alphabet, and have their own names separate from the letters they are based on. Capital ẞ was declared an official letter of the German alphabet on 29 June 2017. Previously represented as . Historically, long s (s) was used as well, as in English and many other European languages. While the Council for German Orthography considers distinct letters, disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (considering special letters as variants of ) and 30 (counting all special letters separately). Umlaut (diacritic) The accented letters 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 after the back vowel to be modified, but German printers developed the space-saving typographical convention of replacing the full with a small version placed above the vowel to be modified.