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I could not find a table of the contractions of prepositions and definite articles in German, so I made one by my own: enter image description here
Is this an exhausting table of all the contraction there are?

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Just to point this out, there are quite a few mistakes in your table: it should be ins, übers, ... Note that there's also übern for über den. – Hendrik Vogt Apr 15 '12 at 7:28
Du hast recht, ich werde es sofort zu korrigieren – idober Apr 15 '12 at 8:11
@Hendrik Vog, Do other preposition besides über form a contraction with den? – idober Apr 15 '12 at 8:20
It's probably regional usage, but I hear sometimes "aufm", too. – Landei Apr 15 '12 at 15:50
Das klingt interessant! – menjaraz Apr 16 '12 at 6:27

1 Answer

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Some of those are colloquial and are avoided in formal speech. Personally I'd classify "vorm", "hinterm", "unterm", and "überm" as colloquial.

There exist similar colloquial contractions for other prepositions, e.g., "nebens", "außerm", or "wegem" (in colloquial speech "wegen" takes the dative case, not the genitive).

By looking at the table, I realized that these contractions are pretty regular:

  • They are created by appending the last letter of the article to the preposition.
  • n + m is replaced by m.
  • Where a contraction would in phonologically unwieldy constructs (e.g. n + r), none exists.
  • Contractions only exist for grammatically correct combinations (since "bei" requires the dative case, there cannot be any "bei das" or "beis").
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