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I know that the date format dd.MM.yyyy is more common in Germany, but there are many reasons and situations to prefer yyyy-MM-dd. But how do I write that in a sentence, what is the correct grammar?
For example, what is the corresponding way to say "findet am 1.1.2000 statt"? Saying "findet am 2000-01-01 statt" sounds weird, because it connects a word that aims at a date with a year instead.
In some cases, grammar similar to clock times feels mostly right, for example "von 2000-01-01 bis 2025-11-25", but I don't know whether that is actually correct.

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    Can you give examples where and why you think it makes sense to note a date backwards? Commented 2 days ago
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    @tofro using it backward lends itself to sorting algorithms which will then sort the dates correctly ascending or descending. For instance in filenames or in logfiles I always use the yyyy-mm-dd format. Yet that is not a good reason to use such date format used for machine consumption in a text (it may be different in tables... but even then the above reason is only an excuse for lazyness to some degree) Commented 2 days ago
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    @planetmaker Agree that machines might like the backward date more. But we are talking language (i.e. I'm assuming continued, human-consumable text) here, something that machines (at least used to) not like anyhow. The times where text needed to be more compatible to machines than to humans are, IMHO, over. Commented 2 days ago
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    @tofro the problem isn't about humans vs. machines, it is about consistency and avoiding errors due to ambiguity. There is a lot of potential for that between the dd.mm.yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy styles (the separator is no reliable indication). Fortunately, in Germany the latter are not used, but in other countries they are. The only reliable ways out are to use a format that is actually standardized internationally, which ISO-8601 is, or to write out the month names. ISO-8601 just makes sense: it is concise, consequent, and only feels unnatural if you're not used to it. Commented yesterday
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    @leftaroundabout I don't get your point why German texts (that will only be understandable to German-speaking readers) should contain dates that should be understandable to non-German-speaking readers. This is not about usefulness of whatever date format as such, but about date formats used in German texts (otherwise, this question would be largely off-topic). You can simply take it as a given that in a German text dates will show up as dd.mm.[yy]yy. Everything else is just confusing people. Commented yesterday

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Language is about speaking. It's not about writing!1

Why is this important? It's important because you need to understand that writing is solely and exclusively a method of conveying words that were originally intended to be spoken across space and/or time. Written text is always just a codification of spoken language. This means that spoken language always determines its written form. It is never the other way around.

In German you say

Das Treffen findet am dritten achten zwanzigsechsundzwanzig2 um elf Uhr fünfzehn statt.

If you encode it to text exactly as it's spoken, but using digits to encode numbers, you get this:

Das Treffen findet am 3. 8. 2026 um 11 Uhr 15 statt.

Note, that ordinals are written with a dot after the number in German (English "1st" = German "1.", English "2nd" = German "2.", etc, and so also English "3rd" = German "3." and English "8th" = German "8.")

In case of dates, you often eliminate the space between day, month and year:

Das Treffen findet am 3.8.2026 um 11 Uhr 15 statt.

And in case of time, you usually move the minutes before the word "Uhr", and separate hour and minutes either by a colon or by a dot. I also have seen that the minutes are written as superscript, especially in handwriting, but as far as I experience this, only elder people write times that way:

Das Treffen findet am 3.8.2026 um 11:15 Uhr statt.
Das Treffen findet am 3.8.2026 um 11.15 Uhr statt.
Das Treffen findet am 3.8.2026 um 1115 Uhr statt.

And because the context and the special syntax of the time notation with colon or superscript makes clear, that this is a time, sometimes also the word "Uhr" is omitted:

Das Treffen findet am 3.8.2026 um 11:15 statt.
Das Treffen findet am 3.8.2026 um 1115 statt.

Note, that nothing of this encoding changes anything on pronunciation. All 8 sentences shown here are pronounced exactly the same. You can't hear any difference when you read them aloud. (Only the year number 2026 might be pronounced as "zweitausendsechsundzwangig" by some speakers, but that is because of personal preferences of those speakers, not because of the way how it is written.)

And then there are standards.

  • ISO 8601 defines data elements and interchange formats. So it's a standard about data processing. It is not a standard for writing letters, books or similar texts.

    This standard defines formats, that are easy to process by computers. It defines these formats:

    20260803 Base format
    2026-08-03 Extended format
    2026-08 Lower accuracy: a certain month
    2026 Lower accuracy: a certain year

    Note that all formats include leading zeros for the month and day if these would otherwise be single digits.

    Please also note that ISO 8601 does not define pronunciation rules, as computers do not speak very much. Second reason: these rules are completely independent of all human languages. Remember: these rules are designed to make life easier for computers. They were developed for data processing, not for human communication.

  • DIN 5008 is a collection of writing and design rules for text and information processing. So, this standard is—among other things—about formatting dates in letters, books or similar texts when you use the German language.

    This standard defines formats, that are meant to be read by humans. It defines these formats:

    2026-08-03 Preferred format for information processing, but not recommended in running texts.
    03.08.2026 Optional format in letters to domestic recipients
    3. August 2026 Format with written-out name of the month. Note the there is no leading zero for the day.
    3. Aug. 2026 Format with abbreviated month name.

So, the format 2026-08-03 is contained in both standards, but both standards do not define any pronunciation, because none of them is about spoken language. ISO 8601 is not about any language at all, and DIN 5008 is only about written German, not about spoken German.

So the question remains: When you write something like this

Das Treffen findet am 2026-08-03 um 11:15 statt.

How do you pronounce it? And the answer is very simple: You pronounce it exactly like any other examples given here:

Das Treffen findet am dritten achten zwanzigsechsundzwanzig2 um elf Uhr fünfzehn statt.

1 That's why there is no language on earth in which the word for "language" is derived from a word that means "writing" or "pen" or "hand" or something else that might be connected to writing. But there are so many languages where the word for "language" is derived from a word that means "speaking" or "tongue". For example English: the word "language" is derived via an intermediate French step from Latin "lingua" which means "tongue". And in German it's even more obvious: The verb "to speak" is "sprechen" in German, and the nominalization of this verb is "die Sprache" which is the german word for "the language" but means "the spoken".
Also: French "langue", Spanish "lengua", Italian "lingua", Romanian "limbă", Russian "язык", Polish "język", Czech "jazyk", Finnish "kieli" Estonian "keel", Turkish "dil", Zulu "ulimi", Hebrew "לשון", Arabic "لسان" - all these words mean "language" and they all derive from a word that means "tongue".
But there are also many languages where the word for "langauge" derives from a word that means "to talk", "to speak" or "to tell (a story)": Dutch and Africaans "taal", Sanskrit "bhāṣā", Chinese "语言", Japanese "言語", Maori "reo", ...
There is not a single language on the entire planet Earth where the word, that means "language" in this language originates from something that has to do with writing or reading.

2 The official standard pronunciation of 2026 is "zweitausendsechsundzwanzig" ("two thousand twenty-six"). But in colloquial speech "zwanzigsechsundzwanzig" ("twenty twenty-six") is used more frequently.

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    There's also a clear, unambigous and elegant option: Das Treffen findet am 3. August 2026 um 11:15 Uhr statt. That won't have (foreign) people guessing which number is the month. Commented yesterday
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    +1, of course, 11:15 could also be pronounced as "Viertel nach elf" or "Viertel zwölf" instead, if you are already nitpicking about the pronunciation of the year. Commented 22 hours ago
  • Additionally, it is worth mentioning, even without using linguistics, that people talked long before writing. Even today, people learn to talk long before learning to write. Commented 3 hours ago
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There is just no reason to use this format in prose texts, it's that simple.

Its sortability and international standardisation are good reasons to use ISO-8601 format in tables, filenames, databases, text files, source code etc. But in written texts in German language, as part of a sentence, it just isn't used because it doesn't make sense. And if it's used anyway for some reason, it's not read out loud any differently from other dates.

Sure, you could write "findet am 2000-01-01 statt", but nobody really does, because why would you do that in a German sentence? It just makes it harder to read, and the advantages of this format don't play out.

However, if somebody wrote it like that anyway, or if you're reading data from a database table out loud, then people that are able to pronounce written "87 365,16 €" as "siebenundachtzigtausenddreihundertfünfundsechzig Euro und sechzehn Cent" are just as easily able to pronounce written "findet am 2025-07-01 statt" as "findet am ersten Juli 2025 statt". That is still the most easily understandable format in spoken communication.

The complicated topic of international date formats doesn't have a simple international one-fits-all solution anyway, and the problem doesn't only affect the order of the parts of a date, it starts with different cultures using completely different calendars. In the days of early computer technology, we often thought that trying to set new standards for everyone could be the solution, but these days are long gone. Today, we mostly leave it to specialized software modules to take care of internationalization and use technical standards that fit the purpose for internal representation.

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    Downvoted because in my experience (communication between IT-affine people in German, at least ...), "it just isn't used" is simply false and writing something like "findet am 2000-01-01 statt" is commonplace. Commented 18 hours ago
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    @O.R.Mapper Any links to texts, blogs, announcements? I can only write from what I see, I work in software development, and we would never use that in prose except maybe in the sloppiest texting (e.g directly copied from some tech system into Teams), and I can't remember seeing it anywhere in a text that had any kind of effort put into its creation. Commented 17 hours ago
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The ISO 8601 format is rarely used in non-technical communication, so there would be no official style guide in Duden oder DIN 5008 on how to use it, whereas there is for different styles of dates [1]. My two suggestions would be to either

  1. Make it explicit and write (since "an dem" followed by the year seems odd)

"Die Einweihung findet am Datum 2025-11-25 statt."

or

  1. Make it military style and write (similar to military time, e.g. "Die Ausbildung beginnt um 0800.")

"Die Einweihung findet 2025-11-25 statt."

For all other uses, such as since, or timespans, the use is rather natural:

Open timespan in future:

"Das Gesetz gilt ab 2025-12-01."

Open timespan since past:

"Der Verkauf läuft seit 2025-11-15."

Open timespan until:

"Die Abgabe ist möglich bis 2025-11-30."

Closed timespan:

"Der Rabatt gilt von 2025-11-15 bis 2025-12-01."

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