Title Case in Other Languages: French, German, Spanish and More

Title case is largely an English-language convention. Many other languages capitalize titles very differently, and applying English rules can look like a mistake to native readers.

French

French titles typically use sentence case: only the first word and proper nouns are capitalized, as in "Le petit prince". Some publishing traditions also capitalize the first noun and any preceding adjective. Days, months and nationalities used as adjectives are lowercase in French ("lundi", "janvier", "un livre français").

Spanish and Italian

Spanish and Italian titles also use sentence case: "Cien años de soledad". As in French, days, months and languages are lowercase.

German

German capitalizes all nouns, everywhere, not only in titles. A German title therefore looks partly capitalized in any style. Applying English title case to German would wrongly capitalize verbs and adjectives.

Dutch, Swedish and other European languages

Most other European languages favor sentence case for titles, with their own rules for proper nouns.

Languages without capital letters

Many scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi and Urdu, do not have uppercase and lowercase letters at all, so case conversion does not apply.

Practical advice for multilingual sites

1. Use the conventions of each language rather than translating your English style.
2. Ask native speakers or translators to confirm heading style.
3. Use Sentence case in our case converter as a safer default for most European languages, then fix proper nouns and, for German, every noun.

The converter uses Unicode-aware rules, so accented letters such as é, ü and ñ change case correctly.

Frequently asked questions

How does capitalization in other languages differ?

Capitalization in other languages often differs from English. French title capitalization usually uses sentence case. Spanish title capitalization also capitalizes only the first word and proper nouns. German noun capitalization means every noun is capitalized, everywhere.

How are book, song and movie titles capitalized in English?

In English, book title capitalization, song title capitalization and movie title capitalization usually follow title case: major words capitalized, short minor words lowercase. Capitalize short words such as "Is" and "Be" because they are verbs.