Swedish alphabet


The Swedish alphabet is a basic element of the Latin writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet plus Å, Ä, and Ö, in that order. It contains 20 consonants and 9 vowels. The Latin alphabet was brought to Sweden along with the massive Christianization of the population, although runes continued in use throughout the first centuries of Christianity, even for ecclesiastic purposes, despite their traditional relation to Nordic paganism. The runes underwent partial "latinization" in the Middle Ages, when the Latin alphabet was completely accepted as the Swedish script system, but runes still occurred, especially in the countryside, until the 18th century, and were used decoratively until mid 19th century. Popular literacy is thought to have been higher when exclusively runes were used, than in the first centuries of use of the Latin alphabet.
The pronunciation of the names of the letters is as follows:

Letters

Uncommon letters

The letter Q is rare. Q was common in ordinary words before 1889, when its replacement by K was allowed. Since 1900, only the forms with K are listed in dictionaries. Some proper names kept their Q despite the change to common words: Qvist, Quist, Husqvarna, Quenby, Quinby, Quintus, Quirin and Quirinus. Other uses include some loanwords that retained Q, for example queer, quisling, , and quilting; student terms such as gasque and foreign geographic names like Qatar.
The letter W is rare. Before the 19th century, W was interchangeable with V. Official orthographic standards since 1801 use only V for common words. Many family names kept their W despite the change to common words. Foreign words and names bring in uses of W, particularly combinations with webb for Web. Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated V and W as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a V or a W. The two letters were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all V or all W, until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista declared a change. By 2006, W had grown in usage because of new loanwords, so W officially became a letter, and the V = W sorting rule was deprecated. Pre-2006 books and software generally use the rule. After the rule was deprecated, some books and software continued to apply it. Visual Studio 2010 documentation shows the rule still in effect.
The letter Z is rare, used in names and a few loanwords such as zon. Z was historically pronounced /ts/. By 1700, this had merged with /s/. As a result, Z was replaced by S in 1700. Z was instead used in loanwords for historical /z/. Z is more common than Q or W.

Accented letters

In addition to the basic twenty-six letters, A–Z, the Swedish alphabet includes Å, Ä, and Ö at the end. They are distinct letters in Swedish, and are sorted after Z as shown above. Because they do not mark grammatical variation, as the umlaut can in German orthography, or separate syllables, as does the diaeresis, it is not strictly 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, as well as the loanword müsli. 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 such. In a few unchanged English loanwords the y is used for the consonant /j/, following English spelling rules, but it is uncommon.

Foreign letters

Though not in the official alphabet, á is a Swedish letter. In native Swedish personal names, ü and è and others are also used.
The characters à and é are regarded simply as variants of a and e, respectively.
For foreign names, ç, ë, í, õ, and many others might be used, but are usually converted to c, e, i, o, etc.
Swedish newspapers and magazines have a tendency only to use letters available on the keyboard. à, ë, í, etc. are available on Swedish keyboards with a little effort, but usually not æ and ø, so they are usually substituted by ae or ä, and ö. The news agency TT follows this usage because some newspapers have no technical support for æ and ø, although there is a recommendation to use æ and ø. The letter Æ was used in earlier Swedish script systems, when there was in general more similarity between the Scandinavian languages.
The Swedish population register has traditionally only used the letters a–z, å, ä, ö, ü, é, so immigrants with other Latin letters in their names have had their diacritic marks stripped, although recently more diacritics have been allowed.
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.

Handwritten cursive alphabet

The Swedish traditional handwritten alphabet is the same as the ordinary latin cursive alphabet, but the letters Ö and Ä are written by connecting the dots with a curved line ~, hence looking like Õ and Ã. In texted handwriting the dots should be clearly separated, but writers frequently replace them with a line: Ō, Ā.

Sound–spelling correspondences

Short vowels are followed by two or more consonants; long vowels are followed by a single consonant, by a vowel or are word-final.
GraphemeSound Notes
b
c, before front vowels, otherwise. The letter alone is used only in loanwords and proper names, but is a normal representation for after a short vowel.
ch, In loanwords. The conjunction 'och' is pronounced or.
d
dj
f
g, before front vowels, otherwise
gj
gn, word-initially; elsewhere
h
hj
j
k, before front vowels, otherwise
kj
l
lj
m
n
ng
p
rIs pronounced as /ɾ/ in some words.
s
sj
sk, before front vowels and in the words människa and marskalk, otherwise
skj
stj
t
tj
vBefore 1906, and final were also used for. Now these spellings are used in some proper names.
wRarely used. In loanwords from English may be pronounced.
x
zUsed in loanwords and proper names.

The combinations are pronounced respectively.

Spellings for the ''sje''-phoneme

Due to several phonetic combinations coalescing over recent centuries, the spelling of the Swedish sje-sound is very eclectic. Some estimates claim that there are over 50 possible different spellings of the sound, though this figure is disputed. Garlén gives a list of 22 spellings, but many of them are confined to only a few words, often loanwords, and all of them can correspond to other sounds or sound sequences as well. Some spellings of the sje-sound are as follows: