How many letters are in the Swedish alphabet?

29: the 26 letters a to z, then å, ä and ö, in that order. Nine of them are vowels: a, e, i, o, u, y, å, ä and ö. The letters à and é are used but count as forms of a and e.

Why did the Swedish alphabet grow from 28 to 29 letters?

Until 2006, v and w were sorted as one letter. The 13th edition of the Swedish Academy’s word list, SAOL, published on 10 April 2006, gave w its own place after v, a change pushed by loanwords such as webb.

Are å, ä and ö just a and o with accents?

No. In Swedish they are separate letters and come after z, so in a dictionary or phone book, words starting with ö are listed last. They began as an a or o with a small letter written above it.

Where are å, ä and ö on a Swedish keyboard?

On the national layout, SS 66 22 41, Å is to the right of P, and Ö and Ä are to the right of L. The @ sign moves to AltGr+2. Finland uses the same engraved keyboard.

What happens if I type a instead of å?

Often a different word. far is father but får is sheep, and skal is a shell or a phone case while skål is a bowl, or the word Swedes say for cheers.

How many ways can the Swedish sj-sound be spelled?

Claes Garlén listed 22 spellings in 1988, among them sj, sk, stj, skj, ch, sch, sh and -tion. Higher estimates of over 50 exist but are disputed. Many spellings appear in only a few loanwords.

Which Swedish words are spelled with stj?

Only five: stjäla (steal), stjälk (stalk), stjälpa (overturn), stjärna (star) and stjärt (behind). The memory sentence is “Det är lättare att stjäla en stjälk än att stjälpa en stjärna med stjärten”.

What is Swedish pitch accent?

Every stressed syllable carries one of two tones, accent 1 or accent 2, and spelling never marks them. anden means the mallard with accent 1 and the spirit with accent 2; tomten is the plot of land or Santa Claus.

Why is it glas but glass?

Swedish shows a short vowel with a double consonant after it. glas, with a long a, means glass; glass, with a short a, means ice cream. The rule has exceptions: m is not doubled at the end of a word, as in fem (five).

When does Swedish use é?

In a few loanwords where the stress falls on a final e, such as idé (idea) and armé (army), and in surnames like Rosén. It can change the word: ide is a winter lair, idé an idea.

What quotation marks does Swedish use?

The same right-hand mark at both ends: ”like this”. Angled marks pointing the same way, »like this», are also correct. Both are in the Special popup on this page.

Do å, ä and ö make a text message shorter?

No. Å, ä, ö and é are part of the GSM 7-bit alphabet, so a Swedish SMS keeps 160 characters. The curly ” quotation mark is not, and adding one switches the message to the 70-character mode.

Is there a Swedish sentence that uses every letter once?

Yes: “Yxskaftbud, ge vår WC-zonmö IQ-hjälp” has 29 letters and uses each of the 29 exactly once. An older one, “Gud hjälpe Zorns mö qvickt få byxa”, has 28 letters and no w, from the time the alphabet counted 28.

What did the 1906 spelling reform change?

Education minister Fridtjuv Berg had f, fv and hv replaced by v and dt by t, so lefva became leva and lif became liv. A protest signed by 40,000 people in 1908 had no effect, and SAOL accepted the reform fully only in 1950.

Why does Swedish have different words for each grandparent?

The word says whose parent it is: mormor is your mother’s mother, farmor your father’s mother, morfar your mother’s father and farfar your father’s father.

Which English words come from Swedish?

Ombudsman, smörgåsbord, moped, orienteering and rutabaga are a few. Tungsten comes from tung sten, Swedish for heavy stone.

What does ogooglebar mean?

Ungoogleable: something no search engine can find. The Language Council put it on its new-words list, then removed it in March 2013 after Google asked it to change the definition, stating its displeasure at the request.

Since when is Swedish an official language in Sweden?

Only since 1 July 2009, when the Language Act made Swedish the main language of Sweden by law and recognised five national minority languages: Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, the Sami languages and Yiddish. In Finland, Swedish is one of two national languages, and the only official one on Åland.

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Swedish was carved before it was written. The Rök runestone in Östergötland, cut in the early 9th century, carries around 760 runic characters, the longest pre-Christian runic inscription known, and is counted as the start of Swedish literature. Latin letters came with the church. The oldest Swedish law code, Västgötalagen, is dated to about 1225, and its first complete copy was written around 1280. Medieval scribes had no fixed spelling and doubled consonants at will. The three extra vowels grew out of this time: a small e was written above a and o, and a small o above a. The New Testament of 1526, the first printed in Swedish, introduced å in place of the old aa, and Gustav Vasa’s Bible of 1541 settled å, ä and ö, plus ck instead of kk. The Swedish Academy, founded in 1786, issued the first edition of its spelling dictionary, SAOL, in 1874. The 1906 reform of education minister Fridtjuv Berg replaced f, fv and hv with v and dt with t, so lefva became leva; in 1908 a protest signed by 40,000 people changed nothing. The 13th edition of SAOL, out on 10 April 2006, made w a letter of its own, giving the alphabet 29 letters. The 15th edition, published on 28 January 2026, holds about 127,600 entries.

Swedish writes one sound in more than twenty ways. The sj-sound, a breathy hush that phoneticians still disagree on how to describe, is spelled sj in sju (seven), sk before a front vowel as in sköna, stj in stjärna (star) and skj in skjorta (shirt). Claes Garlén’s 1988 study counted 22 spellings. Vowel length is shown by the letters that follow: one consonant after a long vowel, two after a short one, so glas is glass and glass is ice cream. On top of that, every stressed syllable carries one of two pitch accents that spelling never shows: anden is the mallard with accent 1 and the spirit with accent 2, and tomten is the plot of land or Santa Claus.

Swedish keyboards print å, ä and ö on keys of their own. Under the national standard SS 66 22 41, Å sits to the right of P, with Ö and Ä to the right of L, and the same engraved layout is used in Finland. The price is paid in symbols: @ needs AltGr+2, and the brackets and backslash also hide behind AltGr. Texting is kinder to Swedish than to most languages. Å, ä, ö and é all belong to the GSM 7-bit alphabet, so a Swedish SMS keeps its 160 characters, but the curly ” quotation mark is not in that set and one of them drops the message to 70. Swedish .se domain names could be registered with å, ä and ö from 2003, yet many sites still use a and o, and the machine-readable line of a Swedish passport turns Ågren into Aagren. The vocabulary of the feed is regulated too: in March 2013 the Language Council took ogooglebar (ungoogleable) off its new-words list after Google asked for a different definition, and SAOL 2026 added avfölja (unfollow) and klickbete (clickbait). Across the border, Statistics Finland counted 285,360 Swedish speakers in 2024. This page puts all 29 letters on screen, with é, the ” quote marks and kr in the Special popup.

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sj, sk, stj, skj, -tion

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skj: the shirt and the shed

xj in Växjö

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Swedish Keyboard OnlineSvenskt tangentbord

One click to insert — or copy straight to clipboard

How To Use

Type

Accents & quotes

Copy & paste

Swedish Keyboard for Any App

Snapchat

WhatsApp

Instagram

TikTok

Free Swedish Keyboard Online.Type from any device — no download, no install.

One Sound, 22 Spellings

sj, sk, stj, skj, -tion

stj: steal a star

skj: the shirt and the shed

xj in Växjö

Frequently AskedQuestions

Free Keyboards, All Online

Free Swedish Keyboard Online.
Type from any device — no download, no install.

Frequently Asked
Questions