The Swedish Writing System

The Swedish writing system is based on the Latin alphabet with 28 letters. The W is not included in the Swedish alphabet, since it is considered another variation of V; however, the W can still show up in proper names. The three additional letters in the Swedish alphabet are Å/å, Ä/ä, and Ö/ö, which are found in this same order after the z

Unlike Danish and Norwegian, Swedish has maintained the Å/å character since the Middle Ages when its runic alphabet was replaced with the Latin alphabet (Danish and Norwegian reintroduced the character into their alphabets in the Twentieth Century). However, for all three languages, the Å/å character represents the same long a sound. The Ä/ä character, on the other hand, "represents a simple vowel...the same phoneme is represented in Swedish by the letter 'Ä', and in German by 'A-Umlaut.'"1 Finally, the Ö/ö character represents a vowel in Swedish. According to the Wikipedia, the Ö/ö character originated as a "ligature for the digraph 'OE'. In the Danish and Norwegian alphabets, 'Ø' is the equivalent".2

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

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/Swedish.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_alphabet

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



1 "Å" Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5
[Accessed December 9, 2004]

2 "Ö" Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D6
[Accessed December 9, 2004]