German does raise unique challenges, however. It's a fusional language, taking on aspects of inflected languages, where you can add endings to words to change their meanings. It's also an agglutinative language, where you can build long words out of small, simple morphemes. German does both, slapping on inflected endings and agglutinative morphemes alike to create truly gigantic words. So, to the question: Do German people play Scrabble?
Yes, Germans Play Scrabble
No problem. Scrabble has faced far greater challenges than German and met with triumph. There are Scrabble sets in Japanese hiragana, which isn't even an alphabet (it's a syllabary). There are Scrabble sets in Latin, which is a dead language, and in Klingon, which is the language of a people who don't exist. Scrabble fears no German.
Sturm und Drang
The above is not to suggest that German Scrabble players have it easy. Notably, they struggle compared to playing with an English Scrabble dictionary. Playing in German is also harder compared to fully inflected languages like French in creating plurals or new tenses with a single letter. In German, that usually requires two or three.
A major debate among serious Scrabblers in Germany is whether to modify the tile set to 8 per player, rather than 7, to better enable big words. Adding one more tile could make it easier to find words to play. At present, consensus seems to have formed around keeping things to 7.
Around the World in 69 Languages
As noted above, in many ways German isn't even Scrabble's biggest global challenge. It tackles new alphabets, grammar and phrasing issues entirely absent from English. To date, it's succeeded in style, to the point of establishing 69 different Scrabble sets. They follow.
English
Afrikaans
Anglo-Saxon
Arabic
Armenian
Bambara
Basque
Bicolano
Breton
Bulgarian
Catalan
Croatian
Czech
Dakelh
Dakota
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Estonian
Faroese
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Gwich'in
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
IPA English
Irish
Italian
Japanese Hiragana
Japanese Romaji
Klingon
Latin
Latvian
L33t
Lithuanian
Lojban
Malagasy
Malaysian
Māori
Math
Norwegian
Nuxalk
Persian
Pinyin
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Tswana
Turkish
Tuvan
Ukrainian
Welsh
Zhuyin
Some of the Scrabble sets above were not officially released, but became popular from fan-made versions. That's how ubiquitous Scrabble is; even if you don't have it, you can darn well make your own.
The Universal Language
The relationship of Scrabble to its component languages is surprisingly nuanced and complex. To make a functioning game, hard decisions have to be made about what's legal, what's competitive and even what is and isn't "real language." That said, including German wasn't a hard call. Yes, it has some unwieldy words, but it's a popular, entirely playable version of the game.
For some words that could come in handy when you're taking on those mammoth German compounds, take a look at our 21 words without vowels.
Matt Salter has been a professional writer for over 10 years. He is a gaming and technology expert, and world-class word nerd.
