What are the differences in punctuation between German and English?

Question

Each languages has its own ideas of how to punctuate, e.g. space before question marks in French. How is German punctuation different from English?

Answer 1

Dash/Gedankenstrich

German: en-dash/Halbgeviertstrich with spaces on both sides of the dash:

Ich habe dem nichts hinzuzufügen – außer, daß Du jetzt gehen solltest.

English: em-dash/Geviertstrich without spaces

I have nothing to add—except that you should go now.

Answer 2

In English

He said, "Hello, I am Ben".

In German

Er sagt: "Hallo, ich bin Ben".

Notice the colon instead of a comma, and the capital at the start of the quote. There has to be a capital after every colon, if you quote use the first letter in the quote which is H in this case.

Answer 3

Regarding commas: When our primary school teacher started to teach use comma rules, she would say: "Put a comma everywhere you breathe or pause in your sentence". I still think this is a quite useful hint.

Also be aware that after the latest reform, there are loads of optional commas. So rather put too many commas into a sentence than too few. ;-)

Big exception is "und", where you almost never put a comma in front.

Edit: just re-read your question. If you're asking for general punctuation use, I think it's quite similar to English. No extra spaces. Some example sentences:

"Hallo!", rief Hugo, als er Lisa sah. "Du schon wieder?", antwortete sie. "Ach, Lisa", erwiderte Hugo, "sei doch nicht immer so unfreundlich."

Niemals würde ich mir die Haare blond färben lassen - es sei denn, jemand bietet mir viel Geld dafür -; aber andererseits sollte man auch niemals nie sagen...? (never: sagen... ?)

Man sieht also: nach diesem Ereignis hat sich die ganze Stadt verändert - nicht nur einzelne Bürger.

Ungefähr 20% der Ware ist Ausschuss, +/-5 Stück.

Am 20. September 2012 werde ich fünzig. (also: Am 20.09.2012 oder Am 20. 09. 2012).

Die Party beginnt um 15:00 Uhr. (never 15:00Uhr!)

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Answer 4

Composite words

In English, you create composite words by just writing one word after the other, with a space in between:

light switch

In German, you add them without a space:

Lichtschalter

It is possible, but poor style, to create very long words like this:

Hochvoltlichtschalteranschlussklemme (high voltage light switch connection clamp)

As you can see, it's possible, but rarely needed and hard to read. This is done relatively often in laws, which need to be very specific. For instance, german traffic laws are regulated in the

Straßenverkehrsordnung (StVO) (road traffic policy)

If words get otherwise hard to read, it's possible to add hyphens where needed:

Straßenverkehrs-Zulassungs-Ordnung (StVZO) (road traffic registration policy)

It would be legal to write that without any hyphenation. Hyphenation, in general, has become more accepted in recent years, but should still be used sparingly.

Many people wrongly separate composite words with spaces, which is very common in ads or product names, supposedly because long composites are hard to read and hyphens don't look good enough. This is wrong and very poor style, because it causes the reader to pause within the words, and sometimes even distorts meaning: "Besuchen Sie ihren Peugeot Partner" is probably meant to mean "visit your Peugeot dealership", but actually says "visit your Peugeot car, which has the model name Partner" (there actually was a car called Peugeot Partner). Reading these sentences aloud with the different meanings causes different pronunciation, just like in english: "visit your Peugeot dealer" vs. "my car is called the Peugeot Dealer".

Answer 5

There are a lot of differences, one of the most common one could be how German handles
relative clauses.

In English, there is no comma before that:

Do you still have the book that I gave you?

In German, the comma is required to give the sentence its structure:

Hast du noch das Buch, das ich dir gegeben habe?

The rule is actually really simple: in German, every relative clause is separated by a comma.

Answer 6

Quotations and quotation marks

I have often seen quotations in english include the comma that separates them from the rest of the sentence:

"This is correct," is it not?

Apparently this is an american thing. It's wrong in German:

„Dies ist richtig“, oder etwa nicht?

Also note the different quotation marks in German. You can forego them and use the english style if you want to, but it won't be correct. Word should autocorrect quotation marks into the right ones.

Please note that the font on german.SE renders closing quotation marks confusingly. They look like the opening marks rotated by 180 degrees, stroked from bottom towards the top right, while the opening ones look like two commas close to one another. Cut and paste the german quote above into a text editor and set its text to Courier New, for instance, to see the correct rendering.

EDIT: I have added inline code formatting (`), which displays quotation marks correctly. (at least for me)

Answer 7

Not to forget: Punctuation in numbers! The usage of commata and dots is exactly reversed!

English standard:

One million point five : 1,000,000.5

German standard:

Eine Million Komma Fünf: 1.000.000,5

Answer 8

German uses the Chevron style quotation marks:

» Die Schnee-Eule war richtig nett «, sagte Lars.

Answer 9

A list like red, green, and blue would be translated like rot, grün und blau without the comma in front of the und.

BTW: Canoo.net seems to be a very comprehensive resource for questions about grammar.

Answer 10

You can set a comma if you want to guard against confusion:

He decided not to come.

Er entschied, nicht zu kommen.