Swedish alphabet
From Free net encyclopedia
The Swedish alphabet consists of the following 29 letters:
The main feature separating it from the Latin alphabet are the three additional vowels, "Å", "Ä" and "Ö".
The characters "Å", "Ä" and "Ö" — the latter two similar in appearance and in sound to the corresponding German umlauted vowels — are considered distinct letters in Swedish and sort after Z as shown. As it's not a case of marking grammatical variation, i.e. of tempus or modus, or of syllable modification (diaeresis), it is in fact not a case of diacritical marking, and it ought to be improper to call these characters umlauts. However, no better name is known in English. The umlauted "Ü" is recognised and termed a "German U", but only used in names of German origin. It is otherwise treated as a variant of "Y", which in Swedish (in contrast to English) is a vowel only, and never used as a consonant, (although still pronounced as one in certain loanwords).
The letter W used to be seen as a variant form of V, and collated as such, but in 2006, the Swedish Academy chose to follow international standards and confirm W as a letter in its own right.
Additional diacritic marks appear with "à" (which is singularly used for the loan word à, from French) and "é". These are seen as variants of "a" and "e".