Danish 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 letters , , , and are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a that represents is almost never normalized to in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian vs Danish .

The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danish families that use the surname (meaning 'forest') spell it .

The difference between the Dano-Norwegian and the Swedish alphabet is that Swedish uses the variant instead of , and the variant instead of , similarly to German. Also, the collating order for these three letters is different in Swedish: ''Å, Ä, Ö''. and are sorted together in all Scandinavian languages, as well as Finnish, and so are and .

Letters and their names

The below pronunciations of the names of the letters do not necessarily represent how the letters are used to represent sounds. The list includes the number of each letter when following official ordering.

Ordering

Danish

When sorting in alphabetical order in Danish, the numbers provided in the list above is used. Some peculiarities exist, however.
*The digraph is sorted as if it were , in cases where it represents a single vowel sound. This consequently means that it is sorted like two adjacent cases of when it represents two syllables, e.g. as a result of a compound (e.g. 'air conditioner'). It does not matter which vowel sound is represented, meaning that words like 'Afrikaans' and 'Canaanite' should be sorted as if they have an despite not containing any sounds commonly represented by . If two entries contain exactly the same letters except and , the form with comes first.
*If two entries only differ in capitalization, but otherwise contain precisely the same letters, the word with capitalization comes first.
*Accents are not taken into account, except when it is the only difference, in which case the form without an accent comes first.
*In foreign proper names, the letters are sorted as respectively. In the case of a Danish vs. non-Danish letter being the only difference in the names, the name with a Danish letter comes first.
*For expressions of multiple words (e.g. ), one can choose between ignoring the space or sorting the space, the lack of any letter, first.

Diacritics

Danish

Danish orthography has no compulsory diacritics, but allows the use of an acute accent () for disambiguation. Most often, an accent on marks a stressed syllable in one of a pair of homographs that have different stresses, for example 'a boy' versus 'one boy', or 'all, every, everyone' versus 'avenue'. Less often, any vowel including (where it is however recommended to avoid diacritics) may be accented to indicate stress on the word, as this can disambiguate the meaning of the sentence or ease the reading otherwise. For example: 'I was standing' versus 'I got out of bed' (i.e. unit accentuation). Alternatively, some of these distinctions can be made using typographical emphasis (italics, underlining). The dictionary explicitly allows the use of further diacritics when quoting names from other languages. This also means that the ring above and the strike through are not regarded as diacritics, as these are separate letters.

Norwegian

Nynorsk uses several letters with diacritic signs: , , , , , , and . The diacritic signs are not compulsory, but can be added to clarify the meaning of words (homonyms) that would otherwise be identical. One example is ("a boy") versus ("one boy"). Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably , , and , following the conventions of the original language. The Norwegian vowels , and never take diacritics.

Bokmål is mostly spelled without diacritic signs. The only exception is one word of Norwegian origin, namely , to be distinguished from (see below) as well as any subsequent compound words, eg (coat lining) and (animal feed). There are also a small number of words in Norwegian which use the acute accent. The words are (avenue), (diarrhea), (cafe), (idea), (entrance), (committee), (compartment), (mosque), (supper), (trophy) and (discreet). An acute accent can also be used to differentiate / (a) from / (one) eg. (one boy) (a boy).

The diacritic signs in use include the acute accent, grave accent and the circumflex. A common example of how the diacritics change the meaning of a word, is :
* (preposition. ''for'' or ''to''),
* (verb. ''went'', in the sense ''left''),
* (noun. ''furrow'', only Nynorsk),
* (noun. ''fodder''), , the circumflex indicating the elision of the edh from the Norse spelling ( → ; → )
* (noun ''lining'', as in a garment)

Also used is the cedille, but only on a in loanwords, when pronounced like .
* Françoise
* provençalsk
* Curaçao

History

The letter (HTML å) was introduced in Norwegian in 1917, replacing . The new letter came from the Swedish alphabet, where it has been in official use since the 16th century. Similarly, the letter was introduced in Danish in 1948, but the final decision on its place in the alphabet was not made. The initial proposal was to place it first, before . Its place as the last letter of the alphabet, as in Norwegian, was decided in 1955. The former digraph still occurs in personal names, and in Danish geographical names. In Norway, geographical names tend to follow the current orthography, meaning that the letter will be used. Family names may not follow modern orthography, and therefore retain the digraph where would be used today. remains in use as a transliteration, if the letter is not available for technical reasons. is treated like in alphabetical sorting, not like two adjacent letters , meaning that while is the first letter of the alphabet, is the last. In Norwegian (but not in Danish), this rule does not apply to non-Scandinavian names, so a modern atlas would list the German city of Aachen under , but list the Danish town of Aabenraa under . In Danish, the rule is applied, as long as it denotes one sound, for example German Aachen or Dutch kraal, but if it denotes 2 sounds like in (extra work), the two s are sorted as two.

In current Danish and Norwegian, is recognized as a separate letter from . In Danish, the transition was made in 1980; before that, the was merely considered to be a variation of the letter and words using it were sometimes alphabetized accordingly (e.g., ''Wandel, Vandstad, Wanscher, Varberg'' in ''Dansk Biografisk Leksikon'', 1904). The Danish version of the Alphabet song still states that the alphabet has 28 letters; the last line reads ("that makes twenty-eight"). However, today, the letter is considered an official letter.

Computing standards

In computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet:
* DS 2089 (Danish) and NS 4551-1 (Norwegian), later established in international standard ISO 646
* IBM PC code page 865
* ISO 8859-1
* Unicode

See also

* Danish orthography
* Danish Braille
* Danish phonology
* Futhark, the Germanic runes used formerly
* Icelandic orthography
* Norwegian Braille
* Norwegian orthography
* Norwegian phonology
* Spelling alphabet#Latin alphabets
* Swedish alphabet
* Swedish Braille
* Swedish orthography

References

External links

Type Danish characters online

Type Norwegian characters online

{{Language orthographies

Latin alphabets
Alphabet
Alphabet