I i — the Sütterlin letter I

History

The letter I is the 9th letter of the German alphabet. Phonetically, it represents a close front unrounded vowel, occurring as long /iː/ in words like 'Igel' and short /ɪ/ in words like 'in' or 'Kind'. In 1911, the graphic artist and typographer Ludwig Sütterlin was commissioned by the Prussian Ministry of Culture to develop a modernized handwriting script for primary education, creating what became known as Sütterlinschrift.

Sütterlin lowercase i is a single upright stroke in the middle zone with a clear dot positioned directly above it. Capital I is written with an upright loop and a vertical stem resting on the baseline, designed to be easily mastered by Prussian primary school children. Unlike historical Kurrent, which slanted sharply and featured narrow pointed angles (Spitzschrift), Sütterlin mandated an upright posture (Steilschrift) and round curves. It was designed specifically to be written with a monoline steel round nib (Kugelspitzfeder), avoiding difficult variations between thick downstrokes and hair-thin upstrokes.

Historically in German handwriting and typography, I and J were treated as variants of the same letter. In older parish registers and municipal citizen lists, names starting with I and J are regularly filed together under a single index heading, reflecting centuries of unified orthographic tradition. Sütterlin was introduced into Prussian schools in 1915 and spread throughout Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Because it was taught exclusively from 1915 until the 1941 Bormann decree abolished all German scripts, documents written in Sütterlin can reliably be dated to a narrow historical window between the First World War and the mid-twentieth century.

For family historians and genealogists examining early twentieth-century German letters, diaries, postcards, and school exercise books, identifying the regular, upright letterforms of Sütterlin I provides an immediate benchmark for dating and transcribing the text.