When you’re having a conversation and you need to spell a word letter by letter. How do you do it in your country? What’s your version of the nato phonetic alphabet?
In Italy we use names of Italian cities, with the assumption that people know which letter they begin with.
Like:
N di Napoli
M di Milano
R di Roma
This goes for most letters.
It becomes creative with letters that aren’t the initial of an Italian city, or not a big enough city that you’re confident that the listener has ever heard of it. When no city comes to mind you start with very common words that begin with that letter.
K is pronounced “Kappa” so most people try with this at first, or it’s Koala
Z is “Zeta”, same, and it can be Zagabria or Zurigo. Or Zebra.
X is Xilofono because it’s the only word you’re confident that people will understand
H is universally Hotel
And so on.
Comments
The correct way in Czech is tu use names (M = Maria, I = Ivan, A = Adam) but people mostly use whatever they want. Like vegetables, furniture, animals… They tend to be very creative.
We use (male) names of people. But i haven’t really seen it used a lot. So we’ll say B fyrir Baldur and D eins og Davíð for the ones that sound similar. I don’t think it’s used for the whole alphabet.
Mostly countries, with some Spanish cities thrown in for good measure. If I wanted to spell Reddit, it’d be:
Rusia
España
Dinamarca
Dinamarca
Italia
Toledo
In Polish it’s common to use popular/well-known first names:
A jak Andrzej
B jak Beata
C jak Celina
D jak Damian
Ł jak Łukasz
W jak Waldemar
etc
For some unique Polish letters, like Ą, Ę, Ć, Ń, Ó, Ś, Ź, Ż, or for letters not in the standard alphabet like Q, V, X, we use descriptors or give random examples of where the word appears:
Ą – A z ogonkiem (A with a tail) / Ą jak w mące (Ą like in flour)
Ę – E z ogonkiem (Ę with a tail) / Ę jak w ręce (Ę like in hand)
Ć – C z kreską (C with a dash)
Ń – N z kreską (N with a dash
Ó – Ó z kreską / Ó kreskowane / Ó zamknięte (Ó with a dash / closed Ó)
Ś – S z kreską (S with a dash)
Ź – Z z kreską (Z with a dash) / ziet
Ż – Z z kropką (Z with a dot) / żet
V – Fau
X – Iks
Q – Ku
In Danish the most common practice is to use common Danish names, mostly male.
A like Anders
B like Benny
S like Søren
N like Niels
However, if I know or suspect the person has had military experience, I use NATO phonetic.
We use names, like many other countries. It’s called telefoonalfabet.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlands_telefoonalfabet
Edit
Haha, apparently U and Z are hard, as those two are cities instead of people.
I don’t think I’ve adhered to any convention when I was doing it in Croatian. I just said the first word that came to mind for every letter.
But with Croatian it’s not really necessary to spell words out loud that much. Because every letter corresponds to one sound, more or less. So if you hear the entire word, you essentially know how to spell it. You only need to spell out things in case of a bad phone connection or sth.
We use names and sometimes common objects.
N like Norbert
A like András
P like Péter
O like Orsolya
L like László
I like Ilona
We don’t use any specific terms, to my knowledge. If you need to clarify, you use any random common word (like B for banana).
English uses the NATO military phonetic code.
A=Alpha
B=Bravo
C= Charlie….
Or whatever you make up because you can’t remember the word, or never learnt it in the first place.
The radio spellout alphabet of Sweden is Adam, Bertil, Caesar, David, Erik, Filip, Gustav, Helge, Ivar, Johan, Kalle, Ludvig, Martin, Niklas, Olof, Petter, Qvintus, Rudolf, Sigurd, Tore, Urban, Viktor, Xerxes, Yngve, Zäta, Åke, Ärlig, Östen. Every word is a male name.
In Germany we use the following list:
A – Anton,
Ä – Ärger,
B – Berta,
C – Cäsar,
Ch – Charlotte,
D – Dora,
E – Emil,
F – Friedrich,
G – Gustav,
H – Heinrich,
I – Ida,
J – Julius,
K – Kaufmann,
L – Ludwig,
M – Martha,
N – Nordpol,
O – Otto,
Ö – Ökonom,
P – Paula,
Q – Quelle,
R – Richard,
S – Samuel/Siegfried,
Sch – Schule,
ẞ – Eszett,
T – Theodor,
U – Ulrich,
Ü – Übermut/Übel,
V – Viktor,
W – Wilhelm,
X – Xanthippe,
Y – Ypsilon,
Z – Zacharias/Zeppelin
It came up in the early 20th century and has seen a few modifications since then. The Nazis didn’t like (e.g,) Samuel or Zacharias for their Jewish connotation and replaced them with Siegfried and Zeppelin, respectively. But is still widely used, basically for everything but aviation and the military.
We used to use our own phonetic alphabet rooted in Finnish words, but for a while now we have standardised on Nato phonetic alphabet.
I hardly hear people use it in Germany at all. Yes, there are official lists, as people have stated already, but in real life, people just spell the letters and if they need a word to clarify, they just use whatever comes to mind.
In Sweden there is an official alphabet using male names: bokstaveringsalfabetet.
In some lines of work, like the railroad, it is mandatory to learn and use the nato alphabet instead. However I’ve very rarely heard it used in railroad communication. People stick to the traditional Swedish system. It’s considered weird and silly sounding to use English words when communicating in Swedish. When having to use tge nato alphabet, like during a training session, people tend to use a mocking exaggerated American accent. Like trying to sound like a military movie.
There were attempts by some sort of propaganda bureau to replace the official Swedish phonetic alphabet with a new one in the name of equality . They didn’t like that it was all male names and Swedish ones on top of that. They created an alphabet with added female and gender neutral names, as well as some Arabic ones to mirror the population of The New Sweden. Despite campaigning and billboards, it hasn’t caught on.
The official “radio alphabet” for Finnish is
Aarne, Bertta, Celsius, Daavid, Eemeli, Faarao, Gideon, Heikki, Iivari, Jussi, Kalle, Lauri, Matti, Niilo, Otto, Paavo, kuu, Risto, Sakari, Tyyne, Urho, Vihtori, wiski, äksä, Yrjö, tseta, Åke, äiti, and öljy.
So mostly Finnish male names with a couple of exceptions. Defence forces has switched to use NATO alphabet already two decades ago and train operations followed five years ago.
Zagabria for Z, I am honoured. It is my city.
Here, we don’t have any rules for this. So will just say some random words when people on the other side can’t differentiate between say P and B.
Edit: that will happen mostly with last names, as our language is phonetic and it’s not needed elsewhere.
At my job we use the phonetic alphabet. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie. etc. I work at an airport. But generally in my country we use “popular” first names, like Anders and Brian.
In Greece we use the names of the letters in the alphabet, if we want to spell “γλώσσα” (language) for example we’d say gama-lamda-omega-sigma-sigma-alpha
Or most commonly we’d just say “omega and 2 sigma”, because in greek words are written as they sound generally but we have many ways to write the sounds of o, e, i, so we only specify how these are written and if a consonant is double.
If in Finnish, https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioaakkoset
Otherwise, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet