Consonant-to-Vowel Ratio

Ratio of consonants to vowels across all archives. Vowel characters are a, e, i, o, u, ä, ö, ü (case-insensitive); ß and all remaining letters count as consonants; digits, punctuation and spaces are excluded. The chart bars represent vowel share on the x-axis — the inverse of the ratio — sorted ascending by consonant-to-vowel ratio; the C:V value is labelled on the right.

Linguistic Insights

Singability and phonetic openness

Vowels sustain the melodic line; plosive consonants interrupt airflow, while sonorants often support melodic delivery almost as effectively as vowels. Across all archives the ratio sits in a very narrow band — a near-constancy that is largely expected: the consonant-to-vowel ratio is a baseline property of German that the law of large numbers drives toward a common value once hundreds of thousands of characters are aggregated, regardless of genre. Nor does the small residual variation convincingly track a colloquial-versus-literary divide or a difference in phonetic openness.

An orthographic measure, and its complement

Elision is pervasive in sung German — ich geh', hab', gibt's — and where a schwa or other vowel is dropped, the spelling usually drops the vowel letter with it. This depresses the written vowel share unevenly across archives, so part of the small spread seen here may be an orthographic artifact of elision; the Apostrophic Elision page quantifies how often these reduced forms occur. As a further complement, the Vowel Proportions page shows how vowels are distributed among themselves: archives with identical consonant-to-vowel ratios can still differ substantially in vowel mix.

All archives, sorted by consonant-to-vowel ratio (ascending)

Run generate_char_cv_ratio.R to populate this chart.

Vowels: a, e, i, o, u, ä, ö, ü (case-insensitive) · Consonants: all other letters incl. ß · x-axis shows vowel share (inverse of C:V ratio), starts at 33% — not at zero

These analyses are based on corpus data as of July 29, 2026.