What’s new in babel 26.4

2026-03-08

German

⚠ Breaking change. Please, see the german manual for further details. Since this is a significant change, some further minor adjustments may still be necessary.

Version 3 of the german style has been rewritten and now german refers to current German instead of the 1901 variant. This required some readjustments in the babel core. The ngerman is preserved for compatitibility, but its use is discouraged (note also it doesn’t work with the ini mechanism).

In existing documents, you can restore the old behavior for german by requesting before ngerman:

\usepackage[ngerman,german]{babel}

or

\documentclass[ngerman,german]{article}

See also the option glottomyms in the german manual linked above.

Since now german can refer to either the 1901 rules or the modern German, depending on the presence of ngerman, a way to detect if the tradicional variant is used is by checking if the value of \localeinfo*{variant.tag.bcp47} is 1901 – otherwise, it’s modern German.

The same applies to austrian.

As to swissgerman, this name is currently assigned to de-CH, but according to the Unicode CLDR and the IANA registry it refers to a different language with tag gsw. This should be sorted out in the future, but for the moment a warning remembers this fact. You can use german-ch and german-switzerland instead. The CLDR/IANA name swisshighgerman is recognized in both mechanisms (ldf and ini), too. With the ini mechanism, swissgerman is assigned to gsw.

Fixes

Lists inside vertical boxes in documents mixing writing directions where problematic. There is a fix thanks to Udi Fogiel.