About

Alman is a simplified dialect of German designed to reduce the complexity of the language while maintaining mutual intelligibility with Standard German. It systematically eliminates several complex grammatical features:

• Gender System: Uses a single article form for most contexts
• Case Markings: Removes most case-based inflections
• Noun Declensions: Simplifies noun endings across cases
• Job Titles: Eliminates gender-specific forms in occupational titles

While Alman reduces grammatical complexity, it preserves:

• Core vocabulary
• Basic word order
• Verb conjugations
• Essential syntactic structures

This makes Alman easier to learn while remaining fully comprehensible to Standard German speakers.

Goals

The main goal of this project is to enshrine and formalize a German dialect that is as easy to learn as English or Spanish, and to eventually get it recognized by the German state.

We are developing under the following constraints:

• Maintain full mutual intelligibility with Standard German
• Preserve the essential character of German syntax
• Systematically simplify grammar without loss of expressiveness

Language of this website

The specification and related documentation are primarily written in English, because the target audience is non-native speakers of German. The specification is also available in German and in Alman itself, through the language switcher.

Acknowledgements

Alman was developed with Hugging Face. The project uses Hugging Face compute to train and evaluate its language models. The resulting models and datasets are published on the Hugging Face Hub, including GoePT-1-20M and AlmanBench.

The Alman specification is open source and can be edited on GitHub.