Style/Language

Status: This Page is Glorious History! The content of this page either is bit-rotted, or has lost its reason to exist due to some new features having been implemented in MusicBrainz, or maybe just described something that never made it in (or made it in a different way), or possibly is meant to store information and memories about our Glorious Past. We still keep this page to honor the brave editors who, during the prehistoric times (prehistoric for you, newcomer!), struggled hard to build a better present and dreamed of an even better future. We also keep it for archival purposes because possibly it still contains crazy thoughts and ideas that may be reused someday. If you're not into looking at either the past or the future, you should just disregard entirely this page content and look for an up to date documentation page elsewhere.

General Guidelines

When capitalizing song titles, album titles, or artist names, the appropriate grammatical rules for the language the text is written in should be applied unless it can be shown that that the artist wishes the capitalization to be grammatically incorrect, in which case the artist's version of the title or name is the correct one to use.

In the case where a title or name has been printed using different variations of capitalization, whether on a single release or across multiple releases and is therefore not consistently applied, and if there is no evidence that the artist has a preference, then the appropriate grammatical rules of the language in question should be applied regardless of what has been printed.

Language-Specific Guidelines

For more detailed information on language specific grammar rules, see the following pages, or propose one if a language is not represented here.

Note: If you are unsure about the correct language of a title, Tell Similar Languages Apart may help.

• Capitalization Standard Bokmål
• Capitalization Standard Catalan
• Capitalization Standard Czech
• Capitalization Standard Danish
• Capitalization Standard Dutch
• Capitalization Standard English (see also the clarification for Japanese releases)
• Capitalization Standard Estonian
• Capitalization Standard Finnish
• Capitalization Standard French
• Capitalization Standard Frisian
• Capitalization Standard German
• Capitalization Standard Greek
• Capitalization Standard Hebrew
• Capitalization Standard Hungarian
• Capitalization Standard Italian
• Capitalization Standard Latin
• Capitalization Standard Latvian
• Capitalization Standard Lithuanian
• Capitalization Standard Norwegian
• Capitalization Standard Nynorsk
• Capitalization Standard Polish
• Capitalization Standard Portuguese
• Capitalization Standard Romanian
• Capitalization Standard Russian
• Capitalization Standard Slovak
• Capitalization Standard Spanish
• Capitalization Standard Turkish
• Capitalization Standard Vietnamese
• Capitalization Standard Yiddish
• Capitalization Standard for Transliterations

History

The Capitalization Standards began with Capitalization Proposal, which applied to every language. That original guideline now forms the core of Capitalization Standard English, while other guidelines have since been added to the Capitalization Standards to cover some of the other languages which use scripts which support an upper/lowercase concept.