Swedish Alphabet: å ä ö After z, the Late w and the é of idé

Is é a Swedish letter, and what about w, q and ü?

Only w and q are. The Swedish alphabet is a to z and then å, ä and ö, in the list the EU Publications Office (opens in a new tab) keeps for every official language. The grid above holds exactly those. They are also the index headings that Unicode CLDR gives Swedish.

CLDR's main set for Swedish adds à and é, which is why this page shows them in a row of their own. Swedish characters outside the alphabet fall into three groups: accent marks on a vowel, letters from neighbouring languages, and letters met only in foreign names. The table sorts what you see in Swedish text.

Characters	What Swedish does with them	Who says so
å ä ö	letters of their own, after z	EU list; CLDR index
w	a letter with its own section since 2006, sounded like v	Swedish Academy, as Sveriges Radio reported
q	a letter, the rarest one in counted Swedish text	ISOF letter counts
é	an e with akut accent, marking the stressed syllable	ISOF
à	an a with grav accent, in à, à jour and 4 à 5	ISOF
ü	a foreign letter, filed as y	CLDR auxiliary set; measured below
æ ø	Danish and Norwegian letters, filed as ä and ö	CLDR auxiliary set; measured below

ISOF is the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore, whose language advice service runs the Frågelådan question box. Its answer on accent marks (opens in a new tab) says the acute appears in about a hundred loanwords whose base form has a stressed e. It also turns up in some Swedish family names, now and then over another vowel. The letters å and ä have pages of their own: a with circle and a with umlaut, and ö is on o with umlaut.

Why does Swedish put å first, when Danish puts it last?

Because Swedish got the letter centuries earlier. ISOF's answer on the order (opens in a new tab) says å came into Swedish print in 1526, with the New Testament. Danish and Norwegian kept writing the sound as a double aa. Norwegian took up å in 1917 and Danish in 1948, and both put the new letter at the end.

So the three Scandinavian alphabets close in two ways:

Language	Last letters	When å arrived in print or by reform
Swedish	z, å, ä, ö	1526
Norwegian	z, æ, ø, å	1917
Danish	z, æ, ø, å	1948

A second answer from ISOF, on why Swedish has å, ä and ö at all (opens in a new tab), gives the rest of the history. The Latin alphabet has five vowels, and Swedish has had nine vowel sounds since the 700s and 800s. Ä and ö were already in the first printed Swedish book, of 1495. The marks began as small letters written on top: å as an a with a little o above, ä as an a with a little e, and ö as an o with a little e.

The CLDR Swedish chart (opens in a new tab) sorts the same way: z, then å, ä and ö. A list sorted by the Swedish alphabet therefore puts Örebro after Åre, and both after every word that starts with z.

When did w get its own place in the Swedish alphabet?

In April 2006, with the new edition of the Swedish Academy's word list, Svenska Akademiens ordlista. Språkbanken (opens in a new tab) dates that edition, SAOL 13, to 2006. Before it, w words were listed inside the v section, because the two letters are said alike. Sveriges Radio (opens in a new tab) reported the change that week and added that it made Swedish an alphabet of one letter more.

The Local (opens in a new tab) gave the reason: a wave of English words such as webb and wannabe. It opened with a question Swedes often put to foreigners: is that spelled with a single v or a double v?

Software still knows both orders. CLDR has a standard Swedish order with w after v, and a traditional one that files them together. We sorted the same words with each on 2026-10-14, using Intl.Collator in Node.js v26.0.0 (ICU 78.3, CLDR 48.0), with the locale tags sv and sv-u-co-trad.

Place	Standard Swedish order	Traditional order
1	vagn	vagn
2	vind	webb
3	vår	whisky
4	webb	wienerbröd
5	whisky	vind
6	wienerbröd	vår
7	xylofon	xylofon

In the traditional order, webb sorts as if it were vebb, so it comes before vind. Surnames show it best. The standard order gives Vallin, Valter, Vester, Wallin, Wester, while the traditional one gives Vallin, Wallin, Valter, Vester, Wester. A search under the traditional rules also finds Wallin when you type Vallin; the standard rules do not. Vagn before vind is the control: both orders agree on it.

Where does Swedish write é, and does the accent stay in idéer?

Of the Swedish accent marks, é is the common one: it sits on a stressed e in loanwords such as armé, idé and kafé. ISOF gives these examples, along with two surnames, Linné and Sundén, and says the accent normally shows where the main stress falls. The letter under it is still an e, and a Swedish list files idé with the e words.

The accent stays when the word changes. ISOF's answer on inflection (opens in a new tab) gives the forms:

Base form	Forms with endings	Accent?
idé	idén, idéer, idéerna	kept
succé	succéer	kept
kanapé	kanapéer	kept
museum	museet, museer	never had one
jubileum	jubileet, jubileer	never had one

The last two rows trip people up. The rule follows the base form: museum is written without an accent, so museet and museer are too. Capitals keep the mark: ISOF's answer on capital letters (opens in a new tab) writes IDÉ and KAFÉ.

The grave accent is rarer. ISOF lists it in the French loan à, as in à jour and 4 à 5, and in phrases taken whole from French or Italian, such as crème de la crème and pietà. Both accent marks are typed with the methods in the table near the top of this page. On a Swedish layout they come from a dead key, which the Swedish keyboard page draws.

What do akut and grav accent mean in spoken Swedish?

Akut and grav accent are also the names of two tones in spoken Swedish, and no spelling shows them. ISOF's answer on tone accent (opens in a new tab) adds that the pair is now more often called accent 1 and accent 2. The difference is pitch: accent 1 has one peak, accent 2 has two.

Some pairs are told apart by nothing else:

Spelling	With accent 1	With accent 2
anden	the duck (and)	the spirit (ande)
buren	the cage (bur)	carried (bära)
tomten	the plot (tomt)	the gnome (tomte)

So when a Swede says "akut accent", ask whether they mean the mark on idé or the tone of anden. ISOF adds that tone accent is rare in Finland Swedish and that Norwegian has it too.

Where does a Swedish list file æ, ø and ü?

Under ä, ö and y. The Swedish alphabet has no æ, ø or ü, so Swedish reads the Danish and Norwegian æ and ø as forms of its own ä and ö, and the German ü as y. Danish does the reverse with ä and ö. We sorted the same names under each language's rules on 2026-10-14, with the same Node.js build.

Place	Swedish	Danish	English
1	Malmö	Malmö	Mæhle
2	Müller	Müller	Mäkelä
3	Myrdal	Myrdal	Malmö
4	Mårten	Mæhle	Mårten
5	Mæhle	Mäkelä	Möller
6	Mäkelä	Møller	Møller
7	Möller	Möller	Mölndal
8	Møller	Mölndal	Müller
9	Mölndal	Mårten	Myrdal

The Swedish column runs å, ä, ö after Myrdal, and Mæhle sits among the ä names. In the Danish one, Mårten falls to the bottom. English files every mark with its plain letter, so Mæhle comes first as if it were Maehle.

A search box shows the same rules from another side. We compared pairs at the strength that ignores case and accents.

Typed	Text	Swedish rules: a match?	English rules: a match?
ide	idé	yes	yes
ar	år	no	yes
ol	öl	no	yes
Ärö	Ærø	yes	no
Myller	Müller	yes	no
vebb	webb	no	no

The last row is the control: neither treats w as v. The rest are the alphabet at work. A Swedish search lets ide find idé, but it never offers år when you type ar.