Swedish Alphabet - Description

Description

The 29-letter form of the alphabet has been in use for many decades, with the 26-letter modern Latin alphabet, and the 3 added letters 'å', 'ä' and 'ö'. The use of the letters 'q' and 'w' are very rare, and up to 2006, the 'v' and 'w' were often combined in the collating sequence under 'v'. Before the 1906 spelling reform 'q' and 'w' were common, and many family names still use them.

Currently, the 29 majuscule forms (uppercase or capital letters) in order are: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, Å, Ä, Ö. Similarly, the 29 minuscule forms (lowercase or small letters) are: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, å, ä, and ö. Note how the 3 added letters are ranked after the letter (z) and hence words beginning with those letters would be found near the end of a typical Swedish dictionary.

Prior to the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dictionary) in 2006, the letters 'v' and 'w' were collated together.

In addition to the basic twenty-six letters, 'a'-'z', the Swedish alphabet includes three additional letters in the final positions: 'å', 'ä' and 'ö'. These are considered distinct letters in Swedish and are sorted after 'z' as shown above. Since they do not mark grammatical variation, as the umlaut does in the German alphabet, or separate syllables, as does the diaeresis, it is not correct to call them umlauts, despite the lack of a better term in English. The umlauted 'ü' is recognised, but is only used in names of German origin. It is otherwise treated as a variant of 'y' and is called a "German Y". In Swedish, 'y' is a vowel, and is pronounced as a consonant only in certain loanwords as a variant of 'j'.

The characters 'à' (which is used only in the loanword à, from French) and 'é' (used in some integrated loan words like idé and armé) are regarded simply as variants of 'a' and 'e', respectively.

The letter 'q' is only used for a few loanwords, like queer, quisling, squash and quilting, student terms such as gasque in Swedish, or for family names, and foreign geographic names, like Qatar. The letters 'w' and 'z' are used for names, and also for a few loanwords. á is a Swedish (old-fashioned) word, while 'à' is used for a few rare non-integrated loanwords. For Swedish native personal names, 'ü' and 'è' and others are also used. For foreign names, 'ç', 'ë', 'í', 'õ', 'ñ' and many others might be used, but are usually converted to 'e', 'i', 'o', etc.

Swedish newspapers and magazines have a tendency only to use letters available on the keyboard. 'à', 'ë', 'í', 'ñ', etc. are available on Swedish keyboards with a little effort, but usually not 'æ' and 'ø' (used in Danish and Norwegian), so 'ae' or 'ä', and 'ö' are usually substituted. The news agency TT follows this usage since some newspapers have no technical support for 'æ' and 'ø', although there is a recommendation to use 'æ' and 'ø'.

The national population register has traditionally only used the letters 'a'~'z', 'å', 'ä', 'ö', 'ü', 'é', although recently more diacritics have been allowed so immigrants with other Latin letters in their names have had their diacritic marks stripped (and æ/ø converted to ä/ö).

The difference between the Danish/Norwegian and the Swedish alphabet is that Danish/Norwegian uses the variant Æ instead of Ä, and the variant Ø instead of Ö. Also, the collating order for these three letters is different: Æ, Ø, Å.