The Norwegian Writing System

The Norwegian writing system, like Danish, is based on the 26-letter Latin alphabet with an additional three letters - Æ/æ, Ø/ø, and Å/å - placed at the end. In addition, Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk) uses several diacritical marks (à é è ê ó ò ô) to indicate different word meanings.1

The Å/å character was introduced to Norwegian as a replacement for aa in 1917, almost thirty years before the Danish writing system did the same. The old usage of aa can still be found in Norwegian names and historical documents. According to the Wikipedia, the Æ/æ character "represents a simple vowel...the same phoneme is represented in Swedish by the letter 'Ä', and in German by 'A-Umlaut.'"2 The Ø/ø character, on the other hand, represents a unique vowel in Norwegian and Danish and its equivalent in the Turkish, Finnish, Swedish, Icelandic, and German alphabets is the letter "Ö.3

Additional resources on the Norwegian writing system can be found on the Web at:

For additional information on the Norwegian writing system, you can check out the following resources on the Web at:
http://www.hivolda.no/index.php?ID=11686
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/norwegian.htm

For information on The Norwegian Writing System, please see our Quick Facts Library.

  1. "Norwegian language" Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language#Alphabet
    [Accessed December 2, 2004]
  2. "Æ" Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C6
    [Accessed December 2, 2004]
  3. "Æ" Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8
    [Accessed December 2, 2004]