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"^[1] 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.^[2]

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.

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 allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary diacritic signs are provided. However, this support is not complete.

The standard supports the necessary characters for entries in the civil status register, which has replaced the civil status book. According to the Law on the Convention of September 13, 1973 on the indication of family names and first names in the civil status books^[3] 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.

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.^[4]

The text of the predecessor, DIN SPEC 91379,^[5] explanations and lists of characters and sequences as Excel and XML files can be found in Koordinierungsstelle für IT-Standards (KoSIT).^[4] 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.^[6] The DIN contains few additional characters and sequences.^[6][1]

The compliance to this standard will be mandatory for German authorities and organisations in the exchange of data between authorities or with citizens and business from Nov 1, 2024.^[7]

The architecture guideline for German federal IT demands in the version from July 2022 the usage of the predecessor DIN SPEC 91379.^[8]

Continuous text and historic letters are not in the scope of this norm.^[1]

The DIN standard consists of a normative^[9] and an informative^[9] 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.