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Comment by Snild | Hacker News Reader

Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.

By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.

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I lived in Sweden in the late nineties. The local phone book had my Dutch name sorted under the V & W section because it has the word 'van' (means of in English) in it. In the Netherlands my name would be in the G section (van Gurp) because otherwise most of the phone book would have to be sorted under the V, which would defeat the purpose of sorting.

> The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

IKEA sold that too: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/306072403869

Huh, interesting that they are collated at the end. These differences also makes sorting language dependent.

In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---

Even worse, in Czech it’s

A B C Č D Ď E F G H Ch I J…

• „če“ goes after both „ca“ and „ci“, but „ác“ goes between „ab“ and „ad“

• „cha“ goes after „da“ and „ha“

Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents.

At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....

Which has resulted in this catastrophe:

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71OSnDl45vL.jpg

At least Danish and Norwegian share the order; the order is ÆØÅ in Danish as well :-)

But they are on different keys on keyboards, annoyingly, leading to one "ÖÆØ" key and one "ÄØÆ" key on Scandinavian keyboards (not to mention the horrible "½§§§½|" key!).

Yeah, "nordic" keyboards are a pain. I always get a Danish, or extra keycaps :-)

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