What's the difference between ngerman and german in babel?

Question

I use the following three packages to get correct German umlauts in the generated PDF:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % this is needed for umlauts
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel} % this is needed for umlauts
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}    % this is needed for correct output of umlauts in pdf

Today, I have seen this:

\usepackage[german]{babel}

What's the difference between ngerman and german? I think n could probably mean new, but which one should I use? Do you have an example where it matters?

Answer 1

As has been said before, german is Alte Rechtschreibung (= "right-writing" = orthography = "right-writing"), ngerman is Neue Rechtschreibung. The part that's really relevant is hyphenation, because that's what babel influences. So here are some examples what has changed in hyphenation, taken from canoonet (I'm strongly assuming that babel implemented these changes, but I didn't check the code):

old         new
Braue-rei   Brau-e-rei
Bäk-ker     Bä-cker     ← This is imho the most important change, which can easily be spotted
Mei-ster    Meis-ter

While changes like old Schiffahrt to new Schifffahrt are correct, they're not really relevant from babel's point of view because babel doesn't correct your spelling, so that's really up to you, i.e. it depends on what you type. As always with such conventions, you should be consistent in your choice of orthography. Officially, Alte Rechtschreibung has been deprecated for a few years; before that, both were "allowed".

Answer 2

As said before german refers to "Alte Rechtschreibung", the orthography before 2006, and ngerman to "Neue Rechtschreibung", the orthography since 2006 (with transition period since 1996). Thus the differences are:

• Different hyphenation patterns are used due to changed rules in hyphenation. In case of ngerman babel loads hyphenation pattern, that are derived from the old patterns by Walter Schmidt.

  BTW, there are newer experimental patterns, see dehyph-exptl. They can be made available using package hyphsubst.

• Some of the hyphenation rules have changed. In the old orthography ck was hyphenated as k-k. Or triple consonants are avoided if followed by vowels, but the third consonants reappeared if hyphenated, e.g.:

  Schiffahrt → Schiff-fahrt

  In german this was supported by shorthands:

  B"a"cker Schi"ffahrt
  

  Because these cases are simplified in the new orthography, these special shorthands are no longer available in ngerman:

    "c, "C, "f, "F, "l, "L, "m, "M, "n, "N, "p, "P, "r, "R, "t", "T
  

  Also macro \ck has been dropped for the same reason.

Answer 3

Yes, the n stands for new, as it is the "neue deutsche Rechtschreibung" from (in the current form) 2006. One of the most common differences is the different use of 'ß' and 'ss'. As it is the current one, you should always use ngerman.

One example is "Schifffahrt" (new) in contrast to the old "Schiffahrt", as triple consonants at the joint of compound words used to be reduced to only two.