Capitalization in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch

English is the exception, not the rule

English capitalizes the days of the week, the months, languages and nationalities, and the main words of titles. Most other European languages capitalize less. German is the exception in the other direction: it capitalizes every noun. This guide summarizes the main differences for German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese, so that you know what a converter can and cannot do for each language.

The first point is the most important for titles. Title case, with capitalized main words, is mostly an English habit. In the other languages, a title is usually capitalized like a sentence: only the first word and proper nouns have capital letters. A converter set to English title case would therefore produce a result that looks wrong in French or Spanish.

German: every noun, plus formal you

German capitalizes all nouns: der Hund, die Liebe, das Haus. This rule makes the language easy to scan but hard to convert automatically, because only the writer knows which words are nouns. A converter that lowercases German text and capitalizes the first letter of each sentence will leave nouns in lowercase, so you must restore them by hand. For this reason, the converter on this page offers sentence case for German, but no title case.

The formal pronoun Sie and its forms Ihnen and Ihr are capitalized, while the informal du and dein are written in lowercase, although capitals remain permitted in letters. Days and months are nouns and are capitalized. Adjectives from names, such as deutsch and französisch, are lowercase, except in fixed names like the Deutsche Bahn. Titles of works follow the ordinary rule: nouns and the first word are capitalized, with no title case.

French: lowercase days, months and languages

French writes the days, months and languages in lowercase: lundi, janvier, le français. The adjective for a nationality is lowercase (un livre français), but the noun for a person of that nationality is capitalized (un Français). Titles of works usually capitalize only the first word, and the first noun when the title begins with an article: Le Petit Prince is the traditional form, and styles differ.

French has one strong rule that is often ignored in computing: capital letters keep their accents. The Académie française states that accents belong on capitals, so ÉCOLE, À BIENTÔT and ÇA are correct, not ECOLE or A BIENTOT. A converter that uses the Unicode rules keeps the accents when it converts to uppercase, which is the correct behavior.

Spanish: sentence style and inverted marks

Spanish writes days, months, languages and nationalities in lowercase: lunes, enero, el español, los franceses. Titles of books and films capitalize only the first word and proper nouns, according to the Real Academia Española: Cien años de soledad. Proper nouns, such as Madrid and Cervantes, and the names of institutions, such as the Real Academia Española, are capitalized as in English.

Questions and exclamations open with inverted marks, ¿ and ¡, and the first word inside them is capitalized if it begins a sentence: ¿Qué hora es? The sentence case converter on this page handles these marks, so the letter after ¿ or ¡ becomes a capital. Accents stay on capitals in Spanish as well: ÁRBOL, not ARBOL.

Italian and Portuguese

Italian follows the Spanish pattern: days, months, languages and nationalities are lowercase (lunedì, gennaio, l'italiano). Titles capitalize only the first word and proper nouns. The formal pronoun Lei and its forms are sometimes capitalized in letters and written in lowercase elsewhere, and centuries are often capitalized as a name, as in il Novecento. After an apostrophe, as in l'arte or dell'anno, the next letter follows the normal rule for the word.

Brazilian Portuguese follows the same principle: days, months, languages and nationalities are lowercase, and titles use sentence capitalization. After the Orthographic Agreement that Brazil adopted in 2009 with a transition until 2016, the rules on hyphens and accents changed, but the rules on capital letters kept their pattern. Accents stay on capitals.

Dutch: IJ and lowercase u

Dutch writes days and months in lowercase, capitalizes the names of languages and nationalities (Nederlands, Engels), and uses sentence-style capitalization for titles. The most visible special rule is that ij counts as one unit: a word that starts with ij is written with both letters capitalized, as in IJsselmeer or IJsland. The converter on this page applies this rule on its Dutch pages, in sentence case and in the word-capitalization styles.

The formal pronoun u is lowercase in Dutch, unlike German Sie. Names with prefixes such as van, de and ter follow the rules for names: they are lowercase after a first name, and capitalized at the start of a sentence or when used without a first name.

Using the converter in other languages

The converter offers the styles that make sense for each language. Sentence case, uppercase, lowercase and the programming styles work in all of them. The title option, which keeps small words in lowercase, is available on the French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese pages with a list of small words for that language, and it is not offered for German, where nouns would be wrong.

After conversion, check proper nouns, nouns in German, names with particles and the first word after a colon. If you convert to uppercase, remember that the German ß becomes SS and that accents stay on capitals. For a final text that matters, such as a contract or a brochure, a native speaker or a proofreader should read the result.