Symbols
71Click a symbol to copy it and open its page.
Swedish alphabet
The 29 letters in Swedish order, capital and small: A to Z, then Å, Ä and Ö after Z. é (idé, armé) and à (3 st à 10 kr) are used in some words but sort as e and a.
Punctuation
Swedish quotes open and close with the same mark: ”citat” with ’ inside, or »citat» in books. The en dash with spaces is the Swedish dash and starts lines of dialogue.
Currency
The Swedish krona has no sign: write 49 kr or SEK 49. The euro is the currency of the Swedish speakers of Finland and Åland.
Where it's spoken
Sweden first; then Finland, where Swedish is an official language, and the Åland Islands, whose only official language is Swedish.
Swedish in emoji
The cup of fika, the Swedish coffee break with something sweet, a word English has borrowed.
On the map
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The Swedish alphabet: 29 letters from A to Ö
The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Å Ä Ö. The three extra letters are letters in their own right, not A and O with decorations, and they come after Z in exactly this order. A Swedish dictionary ends with words like år (year), äpple (apple) and öga (eye), and a phone book lists Öberg after Zetterberg.
W was long treated as a variant of V and sorted with it; only the 2006 edition of the Swedish Academy's word list, SAOL, gave it a place of its own. C, Q, W, X and Z appear mostly in names and borrowed words (cykel, quiz, webb, zon). Finnish ends its alphabet with the same Å, Ä, Ö, while Norwegian and Danish end theirs with Æ, Ø, Å, and German files ä and ö under a and o. Their collections, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic and German, are linked from this page.
Å, Ä and Ö: what each Swedish letter does
Å å, the a with a ring, writes a long rounded vowel close to the one in British English more or saw: gå (walk), två (two), båt (boat), Åsa, Västerås. It began as an a with a small o written above it and became a fixed letter of Swedish in the 16th century, when the Gustav Vasa Bible of 1541 used it. On its own, å is a word: a small river.
Ä ä is an open e sound, as in English bed or, before r, nearer the vowel of air: här (here), äta (eat), bära (carry), Mälaren. Ö ö is said with the lips rounded as for o while saying e, like German ö or French eu: öl (beer), bröd (bread), Malmö, Göteborg. On its own, ö means island, which is why names such as Lidingö and Värmdö end in it; Öland starts with Ö. The dots grew out of a small e written above the vowel, as in German.
Leaving the marks off changes the word, not just its look. har (has), här (here), hår (hair) and hör (hears) are four different words, and so are far (father) and får (sheep, or gets), kor (cows) and kör (choir, or drives).
É, À and the letters Swedish borrows
é marks a stressed final e in words taken from French: idé (idea), armé, kafé, entré, and in names such as Linné, the Swedish name of the botanist Carl Linnaeus. It is not a separate letter and sorts with e.
à lives mostly in prices and counts, meaning 'at' or 'each': 3 biljetter à 120 kr, three tickets at 120 kronor each. It also stays in French phrases like à la carte. Names from other languages keep their own letters, so a Swedish text may show Müller or Søren, but those letters are not part of Swedish spelling.
Swedish quotation marks, the dash and kronor
Swedish uses the same mark at both ends of a quotation: ”Hej”, sa hon. That is the right double quotation mark ” opening and closing, with ’ for a quote inside a quote. Book typography also uses guillemets pointing the same way on both sides: »Hej», sa hon. Dialogue in novels is often introduced with a dash instead: – Hej, sa hon. The en dash – with spaces around it is the normal Swedish dash in running text as well.
The Swedish krona is usually denoted by kr after the amount, or by SEK in finance: 49 kr, 1 299,50 kr, with a space between thousands and a comma before decimals; shop signs often write 49:- for a round price. In Finland and on Åland, where many people speak Swedish, the money is the euro: 5,90 .
How to type Swedish letters on an English keyboard and phone
On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: Alt0197 Å, Alt0229 å, Alt0196 Ä, Alt0228 ä, Alt0214 Ö, Alt0246 ö, Alt0201 É, Alt0233 é, Alt0224 à, Alt0148 ”, Alt0187 » and Alt0150 –. With the US-International layout, AltGrW gives å, AltGrQ ä and AltGrP ö (add Shift for capitals), and ' then e gives é. On a Swedish keyboard the three letters have their own keys: Å right of P, Ö and Ä right of L.
On a Mac, OptionA types å and ShiftOptionA Å; OptionU then a or o gives ä and ö; OptionE then e gives é; ShiftOption[ types ” and Optionhyphen the en dash. On iPhone and Android, press and hold A or O to pick å, ä or ö from the pop-up, or add the Swedish keyboard to get all three keys. In HTML, write å ä ö (capitals Å Ä Ö) and é.
Where Swedish is spoken
CLDR estimates put Swedish speakers at about 13 million: around 10 million in Sweden, where it is the main language; about 2.5 million in Finland, where Swedish is an official language alongside Finnish and is the mother tongue of roughly one Finn in twenty and a school subject for most of the rest; and around 26,000 on the Åland Islands, an autonomous region of Finland whose only official language is Swedish. Danes and Norwegians can largely read Swedish, and the Sweden, Finland and Åland Islands collections gather the flags and emoji of those places.
How to use them
5 situationsClick to copySwedish Letters Å Ä Ö combos
15Worth knowing
- The letters å and ö are whole Swedish words: å is a small river and ö an island. A well-known line in the Värmland dialect, I åa ä e ö, means 'in the river there is an island'.
- Swedish had no separate W until 2006: before the 13th edition of the Academy's word list SAOL, words with w were filed under v.
- Swedish and Finnish put the same three letters at the end of the alphabet, Å Ä Ö, while Norwegian and Danish end with Æ Ø Å, so the Nordic neighbours sort their dictionaries differently.
- har, här, hår and hör (has, here, hair, hears) differ only by their marks, which is why Swedes read å, ä and ö as letters, not accents.
Questions people ask
8How many letters are in the Swedish alphabet?
29: the 26 letters A to Z, then Å, Ä and Ö, always in that order at the end. É and à are used in some words but count as e and a, not separate letters.
What are the Swedish special characters?
Å å, Ä ä and Ö ö, plus é in words like idé and armé and à in prices (3 st à 10 kr). Swedish also uses the quotation marks ” ” and » » (the same mark at both ends) and the en dash –.
How do you type Swedish letters on an English keyboard?
On Windows hold Alt and type 0229 for å, 0228 for ä, 0246 for ö (0197, 0196, 0214 for capitals), or use the US-International layout with AltGrW, Q and P. On a Mac press OptionA for å and OptionU then a or o for ä and ö. On a phone, hold A or O.
What are the Swedish letters alt codes?
Å Alt0197, å Alt0229, Ä Alt0196, ä Alt0228, Ö Alt0214, ö Alt0246, É Alt0201, é Alt0233, à Alt0224. Type the digits on the number pad while holding Alt.
What is the Swedish a with a circle called?
It is the letter å, said like the vowel of British English 'more' or 'saw'. It is a separate letter that comes after Z, and on its own it is a word meaning a small river. Copy it here: Å å.
What are the dots over letters in Swedish called?
In English they are usually called an umlaut or a diaeresis, and Unicode names the letters 'a with diaeresis' and 'o with diaeresis'. In Swedish, ä and ö are simply letters of their own, said like the e in 'bed' and like German ö.
Is the Swedish Ö the same as the Norwegian Ø?
They write nearly the same sound, but they are different characters: Swedish and Finnish use Ö ö, Norwegian and Danish use Ø ø. Use Ö in Swedish names such as Malmö and Örebro.
What quotation marks does Swedish use?
Swedish uses ” at both the start and the end of a quotation (”Hej”), ’ inside it, and in books also » at both ends (»Hej»). Dialogue often starts with an en dash instead: – Hej.
