The DIN standard DIN 91379: "Characters and defined character sequences in Unicode for the electronic processing of names and data exchange in Europe, with CD-ROM" defines a normative subset of Unicode Latin characters, sequences of base characters and diacritic signs, and special characters for use in names of persons, legal entities, products, addresses etc. The standard defines a normative mapping of Latin letters to base letters A-Z as an extension of the recommendations of ICAO.
In the informative part of the standard, a set of extended characters is defined, which includes Greek and Cyrillic letters as well as other special characters for names of legal entities and product names.
Languages and scripts supported The subset supports all official languages of European Union countries as well as the official languages of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland, and also the German minority languages.
To support other languages that do not use the Latin writing system, the set of normative letters contains all combinations of Latin letters with diacritical marks that are necessary for the transliteration of names into the Latin writing system according to the ISO standards relevant at the time of publication.
The standard supports the necessary characters for entries in the civil status registers. According to the Law on the Convention of September 13, 1973 on the recording of surnames and forenames in civil status registers information in Latin characters is to be taken over true to the letter with all diacritic marks and information in other characters is to be reproduced by transliteration, if possible in accordance with ISO standards.
This support is not complete; for non-European languages that use Latin script, for example Vietnamese is supported, but not, for example, the Togo national languages Ewe (ɖ, ɛ, ƒ, ɣ, ɔ, ʋ are missing) and Kabiye (ɖ, ɛ, ɣ, ɩ, ɔ, ʊ are missing), the South African official language Tshivenda (ḓ, ḽ, ṋ, ṱ are missing), the Namibian national language Khoekhoegowab (the click sound letters ǀ, ǁ, ǃ, ǂ are missing), or Tongan (the fakauʻa is missing). Although the characters mentioned in brackets appear in personal names in the respective countries, the standard does not mention any transliteration rules or mapping rules for writing names in basic Latin letters.
In addition to the normative characters the standard defines subsets of extended characters that contain modern Greek letters for Greece and Cyprus, Cyrillic letters for Bulgaria and special characters for names of products and legal entities.
Conforming applications may support additional characters, however for interface agreements or registers it may be appropriate to support only a final subset of characters and sequences based on this standard.
The text of the predecessor, DIN SPEC 91379, explanations and lists of characters and sequences as Excel and XML files can be found in Koordinierungsstelle für IT-Standards (KoSIT). This reference contains also an XML schema file with patterns to check conformance of text to subsets defined in this standard. Lists of characters and sequences of DIN SPEC 91379 and DIN 91379 as plain text files are available via GitHub in DIN 91379 Characters and Sequences. The DIN contains few additional characters and sequences.
Application of the standard All IT procedures used for data exchange within and between the federal and state governments or for data exchange with citizens and companies must comply with DIN 91379 from 1 November 2024.
The architecture guideline for German federal IT demands the usage of the predecessor DIN SPEC 91379 in the version from July 2022.
Continuous text and historic letters are not in the scope of this norm.
Structure of the standard The DIN standard consists of a normative and an informative part.
The requirements in the normative part are binding for all compliant systems. In the normative part, the letters for processing names with basic Latin letters and diacritics are specified. All compliant systems must support these letters. Furthermore, a mapping of the normative letters to the basic Latin letters A-Z is defined.
A compliant system may support additional letters in addition to the normative letters.
The recommendations in the informative part are not binding for compliant systems. The informative part determines a UNICODE subset of extended letters, e.g. for legal entities, product names and for data exchange in the EU. In addition the informative part defines data types that can be used for checking data fields.
Normative part Compliance To be compliant to this norm, it is required to support all normative letters and sequences at all processing stages, use the encoding UTF-8 at interfaces, and normalize the characters according to Unicode normalization form C (NFC).
Normative letters Any conforming IT system must be able to process the normative letters in all name fields. This includes the collection, storage, transmission, display, and printout.
The normative character groups are given below. The associated characters can also be found in DIN 91379 Characters and Sequences for machine processing. The following tables of characters were generated from the XML file chars.xml in the DIN appendix.
Latin letters (bll) These letters must be supported to represent names, especially personal names.