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The letter Å (å in lower case) represents various (although often similar)
sound In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid. In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the br ...
s in several languages. It is a separate letter in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, North Frisian,
Low Saxon Low Saxon (), also known as West Low German () are a group of Low German dialects spoken in parts of the Netherlands, northwestern Germany and southern Denmark (in North Schleswig by parts of the German-speaking minority). It is one of two di ...
,
Transylvanian Saxon The Transylvanian Saxons (; Transylvanian Saxon: ''Siweberjer Såksen'' or simply ''Soxen'', singularly ''Sox'' or ''Soax''; Transylvanian Landler: ''Soxn'' or ''Soxisch''; ; seldom ''sași ardeleni/transilvăneni/transilvani''; ) are a people ...
, Walloon, Chamorro,
Lule Sami Lule Sámi (, , ) is a Uralic- Sámi language spoken around the Lule River in Sweden and in the northern parts of Nordland county in Norway. In Norway it is especially seen in Hamarøy Municipality (formerly Tysfjord Municipality), where Lule ...
, Pite Sami, Skolt Sami,
Southern Sami Southern may refer to: Businesses * China Southern Airlines, airline based in Guangzhou, China * Southern Airways, defunct US airline * Southern Air, air cargo transportation company based in Norwalk, Connecticut, US * Southern Airways Express ...
, Ume Sami, Pamirian languages, and Greenlandic alphabets. Additionally, it is part of the
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
s used for some Alemannic and
Austro-Bavarian Bavarian (; ), alternately Austro-Bavarian, is a group of Upper German varieties spoken in the south-east of the German language area, including the German state of Bavaria, most of Austria, and South Tyrol in Italy. Prior to 1945, Bavaria ...
dialects A dialect is a variety of language spoken by a particular group of people. This may include dominant and standardized varieties as well as vernacular, unwritten, or non-standardized varieties, such as those used in developing countries or iso ...
of
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
. Though Å is derived from A by adding an overring, it is typically considered a separate
letter Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech or none in the case of a silent letter; any of the symbols of an alphabet * Letterform, the g ...
. It developed as a form of semi-
ligature Ligature may refer to: Language * Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy) * Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words Medicine * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...
of an ''A'' with a smaller ''o'' above it to denote a rounding of the long /a/ in
Old Danish The Danish language developed during the Middle Ages out of Old East Norse, the common predecessor of Danish and Swedish. It was a late form of common Old Norse. The Danish philologist Johannes Brøndum-Nielsen divided the history of Danish in ...
.


Scandinavian languages

is part of the
Danish and Norwegian alphabet The Danish and Norwegian alphabet is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The ...
and the
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 ( to ) plus , , and , in that order. It contains 20 consonants a ...
. In Danish, may represent the phonemes or , while it may represent and in Norwegian and Swedish.


History

Historically,
Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...
had a long vowel (sometimes spelled ). Medieval writing often used
doubled letter A digraph () or digram is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined. S ...
s for long vowels, writing the vowel as . From around 1200, the vowel underwent rounding towards to such a degree that it started to show up in the written language by using . In manuscripts from 1300 to 1400, a word like ''blaa'' ('blue', modern spelling ) could also be spelled or , sometimes with an added line. In
Old Swedish Old Swedish ( Modern Swedish: ) is the name for two distinct stages of the Swedish language that were spoken in the Middle Ages: Early Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1225 until about 1375, and Late Old Swedish (), spoken from about 1375 unti ...
the use of the ligature Æ and of Ø (originally also a variant of the ligature Œ) that represented the sounds and respectively were gradually replaced by new letters. Instead of using ligatures, a
minuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...
(that is, lower-case) E was placed above the letters A and O to create new
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived from Ancient Greek ('write'), and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other emic units. The study of graphemes ...
s, which later evolved into the modern letters Ä and Ö, as the E was simplified into the two dots now referred to as an umlaut. Similarly, a minuscule O was placed on top of an A to create a new letter which was used in place of the digraph Aa. It was first used in print in the Gustav Vasa Bible published in 1541 and replaced Aa in the 16th century. In an attempt to modernize the orthography, linguists tried to introduce the Å to Danish and Norwegian writing in the 19th century. Most people felt no need for the new letter, as the letter group ''Aa'' had already been pronounced like Å for centuries in Denmark and Norway. Aa was usually treated as a single letter, spoken like the present Å when spelling out names or words. Orthography reforms making Å official were carried out in
Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...
in 1917 and in
Denmark Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...
in 1948. According to Jørgen Nørby Jensen, senior consultant at
Dansk Sprognævn Dansk Sprognævn ( "Danish Language Council") is the official regulatory body of the Danish language as a part of the Danish Ministry of Culture and is located in Bogense. It was established in 1955. The committee has three main objectives: * to f ...
, the cause for the change in Denmark was a combination of anti-German and pro-Nordic sentiment. Danish had been the only language apart from German and
Luxembourgish Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. The language is standardized and officiall ...
to use capitalized nouns in the last decades, but abolished them at the same time. In a few names of Danish cities or towns, the old spelling has been retained as an option due to local resistance, e.g.
Aalborg Aalborg or Ålborg ( , , ) is Denmark's List of cities and towns in Denmark, fourth largest urban settlement (behind Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Odense) with a population of 119,862 (1 July 2022) in the town proper and an Urban area, urban populati ...
and
Aabenraa Aabenraa (; , ; South Jutlandic: ''Affenråe'', also known as Åbenrå) is a town in Southern Denmark, at the head of the Aabenraa Fjord, an arm of the Little Belt, north of the Denmark–Germany border and north of German town of Flensburg. It ...
; however, Ålborg and Åbenrå are the spellings recommended by the Danish Language Board. Between 1948 and 2010, the city of
Aarhus Aarhus (, , ; officially spelled Århus from 1948 until 1 January 2011) is the second-largest city in Denmark and the seat of Aarhus municipality, Aarhus Municipality. It is located on the eastern shore of Jutland in the Kattegat sea and app ...
was officially spelled ''Århus''. However, the city has reverted to the ''Aa'' spelling starting 2011, in a controversial decision citing internationalization and
web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
compatibility advantages. Icelandic and Faroese are the only North Germanic languages not to use the ''å''. The Old Norse letter ''á'' is retained, but the sound it now expresses is a diphthong, pronounced in Icelandic and in Faroese. The short variation of Faroese á is pronounced , though.


Use in names

In some place names, the old ''Aa'' spelling dominates, more often in Denmark than in Norway (where it has been abolished in official use since 1917). Locals of ' and ' resist the Å, whereas ' is rarely seen with Aa spelling. Official rules allow both forms in the most common cases, but Å is always correct. Å as a word means "small river" in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian and can be found in place names. Before 1917, when spelling with the double A was common, some Norwegian place names contained three or four consecutive A letters: for instance ' (now ', a river) and ' (''Blååsen'', 'the blue ("blå") ridge ("ås")'). In family names, the bearer of the name uses Aa or Å according to their choice, but since family names are inherited they are resistant to change and the traditional Aa style is often kept. For instance, the last name ''
Aagaard Aagaard or Ågård is a surname. Notable people with the surname include: * Carl Frederik Aagaard (1833–1895), Danish landscape painter * Christen Aagaard (1616–1664), Danish poet * Gudrun Stig Aagaard (1895–1986), Danish textile artist * ...
'' is much more common than '' Ågård''. The surname Aa is always spelled with double A, never with the single ''å''. However, given names - which are less commonly inherited - have largely changed to the use of the Å. For instance, in Norway more than 12,000 male citizens spell their name ''Håkon'', while only around 2,500 are named '' Haakon''. Company names are sometimes spelled with the double A by choice, usually in order to convey an impression of old-fashionedness or traditionality. The double A, representing a single sound, is usually kept in initials e.g. for people whose first, middle, and/or last name begins with the double A. Accordingly, a man named "Hans Aagard Hauge" would spell his initials "H. Aa. H." (not "H. A. H." nor "H. Å. H."), while a woman named Aase Vestergaard would spell her initials "Aa. V." (not "A. V." nor "Å. V.").


Alphabetization


Danish and Norwegian

Correct
alphabetization Alphabetical order is a system whereby character strings are placed in order based on the position of the characters in the conventional ordering of an alphabet. It is one of the methods of collation. In mathematics, a lexicographical order is ...
in Danish and Norwegian places Å as the last letter in the
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
, the sequence being Æ, Ø, Å. This is also true for the alternative spelling "Aa". Unless manually corrected, sorting algorithms of programs localized for Danish or Norwegian place ''e.g.,'' ''Aaron'' after ''Zorro''. In Danish the correct sorting of aa depends on pronunciation: If the sound is pronounced as one sound it is sorted as Å regardless of the sound is 'a' or 'å'; thus, for example, the German city ''
Aachen Aachen is the List of cities in North Rhine-Westphalia by population, 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the List of cities in Germany by population, 27th-largest city of Germany, with around 261,000 inhabitants. Aachen is locat ...
'' is listed under ''Å,'' as well as the Danish city ''
Aabenraa Aabenraa (; , ; South Jutlandic: ''Affenråe'', also known as Åbenrå) is a town in Southern Denmark, at the head of the Aabenraa Fjord, an arm of the Little Belt, north of the Denmark–Germany border and north of German town of Flensburg. It ...
''. This is §3 in the Danish ''Retskrivningsreglerne''.


Swedish

In the Swedish and Finnish alphabets, Å is
sorted Sorted may refer to: * ''Sorted'' (TV series), a BBC television series *"Sorted for E's & Wizz", a 1995 Pulp song * ''Sorted'' (The Drones album), 1999 * ''Sorted'' (DJ? Acucrack album) * ''Sorted'' (film), a 2000 British thriller film *'' Sorted'' ...
after Z, as the third letter from the end, the sequence being Å, Ä, Ö. This is easiest to remember across the Nordic languages, that Danish and Norwegian follow Z first with E-mutated letters Æ and Ø and then the symbol with a one-stroke diacritic Å. Swedish and Finnish follow Z with a one-stroke diacritic Å and then a two-stroke (or two-dot) diacritic Ä, Ö. A combined Nordic sorting mnemonic is Æ, Ø, Å, Ä, Ö.


International transcription

Alternative spellings of the Scandinavian Å have become a concern because of globalization, and particularly because of the popularization of the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...
. This is to a large extent due to the fact that prior to the creation of IDNA system around 2005, internet domains containing Scandinavian letters were not recognized by the
DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various informatio ...
, and anyway do not feature on keyboards adapted for other languages. While it is recommended to keep the Å intact wherever possible, the next best thing is to use the older, double A spelling (e.g. "www.raade.com" instead of "www.råde.com"). This is because, as previously discussed, the Å/Aa indicates a separate sound. If the Å is represented as a common A without the overring (e.g. "www.rade.com") there is no indication that the A is supposed to represent another sound entirely. Even so, representing the Å as just an A is particularly common in Sweden, as compared to Norway and Denmark, because the spelling Aa has no traditional use there.


Finnish

Because the
Finnish alphabet Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising twenty-nine letters but also including two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography striv ...
is derived from the Swedish alphabet, Å is carried over, but it has no native Finnish use and is treated as in Swedish. Its usage is limited to loanwords (the Finnish academic dictionary ''Kielitoimiston sanakirja'', about 100,000 words, has only one word containing Å: ''
ångström The angstrom (; ) is a unit of length equal to m; that is, one ten- billionth of a metre, a hundred-millionth of a centimetre, 0.1 nanometre, or 100 picometres. The unit is named after the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström (1814 ...
'') and names of Swedish, Danish or Norwegian origin. In Finland there are many Swedish-speaking as well as many Finnish-speaking people with Swedish surnames, and many Swedish surnames include Å. In addition, there are many geographical places in the Finnish coastal areas and archipelago that have å in their Swedish names, such as Kråkö and
Långnäs Långnäs is a port in Lumparland on the eastern mainland of Åland, about 30 km over the road away from Åland's capital Mariehamn. Road ferries to Kumlinge (Snäckö) and Galtby via Föglö (Överö) and Kökar start here. Långnäs is an ...
, as well as the Finnish autonomic region of
Åland Åland ( , ; ) is an Federacy, autonomous and Demilitarized zone, demilitarised region of Finland. Receiving its autonomy by a 1920 decision of the League of Nations, it is the smallest region of Finland by both area () and population (30,54 ...
, a group of islands midst between Sweden and Finland where almost all natives speak Swedish. The Finnish name for Å is ("Swedish O"), and is pronounced identically to ''O'', which has the value . (Note that in Swedish, the sounds and may be represented by ''Å'' or ''O'', but ''O'' also represents and .) The substitution ''aa'' for ''å'' is not allowed in Finnish, because ''aa'' is already a common letter combination with the value .


Emilian

In Emilian, å is used to represent the
open-mid back unrounded vowel The open-mid back unrounded vowel or low-mid back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some Speech communication, spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , graphically a rot ...
, like the RP pronunciation of in "up", e.g. Modenese dialect , , "man, woman"; e.g. Bolognese dialect , "
Bologna Bologna ( , , ; ; ) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy. It is the List of cities in Italy, seventh most populous city in Italy, with about 400,000 inhabitants and 150 different nationalities. Its M ...
, later".


Walloon

The letter å was introduced to some eastern local variants of Walloon at the beginning of the 16th century and initially noted the same sound as in Danish. Its use then spread to all eastern dialects, under the cultural influence of Liege, and covered three sounds, a long open ''o'', a long closed ''o'', or a long ''a'', depending on the local varieties. The use of a single ''å'' letter to cover such pronunciations has been embraced by the more recent pan-Walloon orthography ( or Common Walloon), with one orthography for words regardless of the local phonetic variations. In non-standardized writings outside the Liege area, words containing ''å'' are written with ''au'' / ''ô'' (representing the same sound) or ''â''. For example, the word (house) in the standardized orthography is spelled , , in dialectal writings ( is another form that does not contain a long å).


Istro-Romanian

The Istro-Romanian alphabet is based on the standard
Romanian alphabet The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of t ...
with three additional letters used to mark sounds specific only to this language: å, ľ and ń.


Javanese

Javanese uses å to indicate
open-mid back rounded vowel The open-mid back rounded vowel, or low-mid back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The IPA symbol is a turned letter ''c'' ...
together with ó (o acute).


Chamorro

Å and ''å'' are also used in the practical orthography of Chamorro, a language indigenous to the people of
Northern Mariana Islands The Northern Mariana Islands, officially the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), is an Territories of the United States, unincorporated territory and Commonwealth (U.S. insular area), commonwealth of the United States consistin ...
and
Guam Guam ( ; ) is an island that is an Territories of the United States, organized, unincorporated territory of the United States in the Micronesia subregion of the western Pacific Ocean. Guam's capital is Hagåtña, Guam, Hagåtña, and the most ...
. Unmarked ''a'' represents the low front unrounded vowel, while ''å'' represents the
low back rounded vowel The open back rounded vowel, or low back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . It is called Latin turned alpha being a rotated ve ...
. The Chamorro name for Guam is , and its capital is called .


Greenlandic

In Greenlandic, ''å'' is not used in native words, but is used in several loanwords from Danish, such as ''båndoptageri'' (Danish ''båndoptager'') 'tape recorder'. Like in Danish, ''å'' is sorted last in the alphabet.


Symbol for ångström

The letter "Å" (U+00C5) is also used as the international symbol for the non- SI unit
ångström The angstrom (; ) is a unit of length equal to m; that is, one ten- billionth of a metre, a hundred-millionth of a centimetre, 0.1 nanometre, or 100 picometres. The unit is named after the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström (1814 ...
, a
physical unit A unit of measurement, or unit of measure, is a definite magnitude of a quantity, defined and adopted by convention or by law, that is used as a standard for measurement of the same kind of quantity. Any other quantity of that kind can ...
of
length Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with Dimension (physical quantity), dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a Base unit (measurement), base unit for length is chosen, ...
named after the Swedish
physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
Anders Jonas Ångström Anders Jonas Ångström (; ; 13 August 1814 – 21 June 1874) was a Swedish physicist and one of the founders of the science of spectroscopy.P.Murdin (2000): "Angstrom" chapter in ''Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics''. Ångström is a ...
. It is always
uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''#Majuscule, majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally ''#Minuscule, minuscule'') in the written representation of certain langua ...
in this context (symbols for units named after people are generally uppercase). The ångström is equal to (one ten-billionth of a meter) or . In
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, the unit is encoded as . However, it is
canonically equivalent Unicode equivalence is the specification by the Unicode character encoding standard that some sequences of code points represent essentially the same character. This feature was introduced in the standard to allow compatibility with pre-existing ...
to the ordinary letter Å. The duplicate encoding at U+212B is due to round-trip mapping compatibility with an East-Asian
character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical v ...
, but is otherwise not to be used.


On computers


See also

* Æ * Ä * Á * A with ring above (Cyrillic), a letter used in the
Selkup language Selkup is the group of languages of the Selkups, belonging to the Samoyedic group of the Uralic language family. It is spoken by some 1,570 people (1994 est.) in the region between the Ob and Yenisei Rivers (in Siberia). The language name ''Se ...
* Ø * Ö *
Combining character In digital typography, combining characters are Character (computing), characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritic, diacritical marks (including c ...
(A and combining ring above (U+030A), Å å, or o above (U+0366), Aͦ aͦ, resembles Å å)


Notes


References

*Pettersson, Gertrud (1996), ''Svenska språket under sjuhundra år: en historia om svenskan och dess utforskande'', Lund:
Studentlitteratur Studentlitteratur is an academic publishing company based in Sweden and publishing mostly in Swedish. It is one of the largest producers of university text books and course books in Sweden. The company was established in 1963 and is based in t ...
, {{DEFAULTSORT:Ao Danish language Istro-Romanian language Norwegian language Latin letters with diacritics Swedish language Vowel letters