The
DanishDanish is one of the North Germanic languages , a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany where it holds the...
and NorwegianNorwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants ...
alphabetAn alphabet is a standardized set of letters basic written symbols or graphemes each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or...
is based upon the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...
and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1955 (Danish), although Danish didn't officially recognize the W as a separate letter until 1980.
Majuscule FormsCapital letters or majuscules [IPA pronunciation: /məˈdʒʌskjuls, ˈmædʒəˌskjuls/], in the Roman alphabet A, B, C, D, etc., may also be called capitals, or caps. Upper case, upper-case, or uppercase is also often used in this context as synonym of capital...
(also called uppercase or capital letters) |
AThe letter A is the first letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled a; the plural is aes, though this is rare.- History :...
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BB is the second letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled bee, plural bees.-History:The letter B might have started as a pictogram of the floorplan of a house in Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet...
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C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiceless postalveolar affricate , and is equivalent to the voiceless postalveolar affricate, , or the voiceless retroflex affricate,...
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DD is the fourth letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled dee, plural dees.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet probably developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this...
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E E is the fifth letter in the Latin alphabet. It is also the second vowel in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled e; the plural is ees, though this is rare...
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FF is the sixth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ef or eff.-History:The origin of F is the Semitic letter vâv that represented the sound /v/, and originally probably represented either a "hook" or a "club"...
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GG is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled gee.-History:The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar from voiceless...
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HH is the eighth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in both British and American English is aitch , plural aitches, though it is also pronounced haitch in some dialects .-History:...
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II is the ninth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its English name is spelled i; the plural is ies, though this is rare.-History:...
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J Ĵ or ĵ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar fricative , and is equivalent to the voiced postalveolar fricative, , or the voiced retroflex fricative, ....
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KK is the eleventh letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled kay.-History and usage:...
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LŁ or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni and Dogrib alphabets, and of several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language...
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MM is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled em.-History:The letter M derives its shape from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water. It is known that Semitic people working in Egypt c...
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NN is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled en.- Usage :N represents the dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet. A common digraph with is , which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages,...
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OO is the fifteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled o; the plural is oes, though this is rare.- History :...
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P P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled pee.-History:The Semitic Pê , as well as the Greek Π or π , and the Etruscan and Latin letters that developed from the former alphabet, all symbolized , a voiceless bilabial plosive.-Usage:In English and...
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QQ is the seventeenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled cue.- History :The Semitic sound value of Qôp was , a sound common to Semitic languages, but not found in English or most Indo-European ones...
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RR is the eighteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ar; its name in Hiberno-English is or .-History:...
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SS is the nineteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ess, or usually es- when part of a compound word; the plural is esses.- Usage :...
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TT is the twentieth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled tee. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most common letter in the English language.- History :...
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U U is the twenty-first letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled u; the plural is ues, though this is rare.-History:...
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V V is the twenty-second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled vee.-The letter:The letter V ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw, as do the modern letters F, U, W, and Y. See F for details....
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WW is the twenty-third letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled double-u; the plural is double-ues, though this is rare.-History:...
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XX is the twenty-fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled ex, plural exes .-History:...
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YThe letter Y is the twenty-fifth and penultimate letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English is spelled wye or occasionally wy, plural wyes.-History:...
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ZZ is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In many dialects of English, the letter's name is zed, , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta . In American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal form...
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Æ Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of many languages, including, among others, Danish and Norwegian...
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Ø Ø , is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese and Norwegian languages.The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents . Though not its native name, among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed o" or "o with stroke"...
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Å The letter Å represents various sounds in the alphabets used for Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish , North Frisian, Walloon, Chamorro, Istro-Romanian, Lule Sami, Skolt Sami, Southern Sami and the Alemannic and Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German.Å is often perceived as an A with a ring,...
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| Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small 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 |
æ |
ø |
å |
- (Listen to a Danish speaker recite the alphabet in Danish.)
The letters c, q, w, x and z 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 the original spelling of loan words. In particular, a 'c' that represents /s/ is almost never normalized to 's' in Danish, as would most often happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
roots retain 'c' in their Danish spelling.
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
Skov (literally: "Forest") spell it
Schou.
Norwegian
Norwegian (especially the
NynorskNynorsk or New Norwegian is one of the two official written languages in Norway, the other being Bokmål. Just above 10% of the Norwegian population use Nynorsk as their primary written language...
variant) also uses several letters with
diacriticA diacritic is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective...
signs: é, è, ê, ó, ò, â, and ô. The diacritic signs are not compulsory, but can be added to clarify the meaning of words (
homonymIn linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings, usually as a result of the two words having different origins...
s) which otherwise would be identical. One example is
ein gut/
en gutt (a boy) versus
éin gut/
én gutt (one boy). Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably ü, á and à.
The diacritic signs in use include the
acute accentThe acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-History:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels....
,
grave accentThe grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, and other languages....
and the
circumflexThe circumflex ' is a diacritic mark used in written Afrikaans, Breton, Croatian, Esperanto, French, Frisian, Italian, Romanized Japanese, Norwegian, Romanized Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Turkish, Vietnamese, Welsh and other languages...
. A common example of how the diacritics change the meaning of a word, is
for (all examples in Norwegian Nynorsk):
- for (preposition. For or to)
- fór (verb. Went, especially went quickly)
- fòr (noun. Furrow)
- fôr (noun. Fodder)
Danish
Standard Danish orthography has no compulsory diacritics, but allows the use of an
acute accentThe acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-History:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels....
for disambiguation. Most often, an accent on
e marks a stressed syllable in one of a pair of
homographA homograph is one of a group of words that share the same spelling but have different meanings...
s that have different stresses, for example
en dreng (a boy) versus
én dreng (one boy) or
alle (every/everyone) versus
allé (avenue).
Less often, any vowel except '
åThe letter Å represents various sounds in the alphabets used for Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish , North Frisian, Walloon, Chamorro, Istro-Romanian, Lule Sami, Skolt Sami, Southern Sami and the Alemannic and Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German.Å is often perceived as an A with a ring,...
' may be accented to indicate stress on a
word, either to clarify the meaning of the sentence, or to ease the reading otherwise. For example:
jeg stód op ("I was standing"), versus
jeg stod óp ("I got out of bed");
hunden gør (det) ("the dog does (it)"), versus
hunden gǿr ("the dog barks"). Most often, however, such distinctions are made using typographical emphasis (italics, underlining) or simply left to the reader to infer from the context, and the use of accents in such cases may appear dated.
History
The letter
Å (
HTMLHTML, which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images...
å) was introduced in Norwegian in 1917, replacing
Aa. Similarly, the letter
Å 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
A. Its place as the last letter of the alphabet, as in Norwegian, was decided in 1955. The former
digraphA digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
Aa still occurs in personal names and many geographical names and remains in use as a transliteration, if the letter is not available for technical reasons.
Aa is treated like
Å in
alphabetical sortingCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetisation, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
, not like two adjacent letters
A. This rule does not apply to non-Scandinavian names, so a modern atlas would list the German city of
AachenAachen is a historic spa city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the medieval Kings of Germany...
under
A but list the Danish town of
AabenraaThe city of Aabenraa is situated at the head of the Aabenraa Fjord, an arm of the Little Belt, in Denmark, 38 miles north of the town of Schleswig. Its name— Aabenraa, dialect Affenrå— meant originally "open beach"...
under
Å.
The difference between the Dano-Norwegian and the
Swedish alphabetThe modern Swedish alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 29 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet, plus three using diacritics:
...
is that Swedish uses the variant
Ä instead of
Æ, and the variant
Ö instead of
Ø — similar to
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
. Also, the
collating orderCollation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetisation, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...
for these three letters is different:
Å, Ä, Ö.
In current Danish and Norwegian,
W is recognized as a separate letter from
V. In Danish, the transition was made in 1980; before that, the
W was merely considered to be a variation of the letter
V and words using it were alphabetized accordingly (e.g.: "Wales, Vallø, Washington, Wedellsborg, Vendsyssel"). A common Danish children's song about the alphabet still states that the alphabet has 28 letters; the last line reads
otte-og-tyve skal der stå, i.e. "that makes twenty-eight". However, today the letter "w" is considered an official letter.
Computing standards
In
computingA computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions.Although mechanical examples of computers have existed through much of recorded human history, the first electronic computers were developed in the mid-20th century . These were the size of a large room, consuming as...
, 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
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...
code pageCode page is another name for character encoding.The term code page originated from IBM's EBCDIC-based mainframe systems,, but many vendors use this term including Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle....
865
- ISO 8859-1
- Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
See also
- Danish phonology
- Consonants :Danish has 17 to 19 consonants, depending on analysis: are voiceless and aspirated: . are voiceless and lenis: . , and are distinguished only in word-initial position or at the beginning of a stressed syllable...
- Norwegian phonology
The sound system of Norwegian is similar to that of Swedish. There is considerable variation among the dialects, but the variant generally taught to foreign students is Standard Østnorsk , which is the one this article describes....
- Futhark
The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
, the Germanic runes used formerly
- Swedish alphabet
The modern Swedish alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 29 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet, plus three using diacritics:
...