| Kurrent | |
|---|---|
 Alphabet in Kurrent script from about 1865. The next-to-last line shows the umlauts ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩, and the corresponding capital letters ⟨Ae⟩, ⟨Oe⟩, and ⟨Ue⟩; and the last line shows the ligatures ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ck⟩, ⟨th⟩, ⟨sch⟩, ⟨sz⟩ (⟨ß⟩), and ⟨st⟩. | |
| Script type | |
Period | – |
| Direction | Left-to-right  |
| Languages | German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic |
| ISO 15924 | |
| ISO 15924 | Latf (217), Latin (Fraktur variant) |
Kurrent (German: [kʊˈʁɛnt]), also known as Kurrentschrift ("cursive script"), deutsche Schrift ("German script"), and German cursive, is an old form of hand used for writing the German language, and during the 19th century also the Nordic languages. Evolving out of late medieval cursive writing, many individual letters acquired variant forms over the long history of its use into the first part of the 20th century.
Similarly to Antiqua and Fraktur, German writers used both cursive styles — Kurrent and "Latin" cursive — concomitantly: location, contents, and context of the text determined which script style to use, and it was accordingly normal to switch between the two within a sentence. For instance, a term in French or a French toponym would be written in "Latin" cursive, surrounded by Kurrent.
Sütterlin is a modern script based on Kurrent that is characterized by simplified letters and vertical strokes. It was developed in 1911 and taught in all German schools as the primary script from 1915 until the beginning of January 1941, when it was replaced with deutsche Normalschrift ("normal German handwriting"), sometimes called "Latin writing".
