Swedish alphabet

The Swedish alphabet is the writing system used for the Swedish language. The 29 letters of this alphabet are the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet ('A' through 'Z') plus 'Å', 'Ä', and 'Ö', in that order.

The letter 'Q' is rare. 'Q' was common in ordinary words before 1889, when its replacement by 'K' was allowed. Since 1900, only the forms with 'K' are listed in dictionaries. Some proper names kept their 'Q' despite the change to common words: Qvist, Quist, , Quenby, Quinby, Quintus, Quirin and Quirinus. Other uses include some loanwords that retained 'Q', for example queer, quisling, , and quilting; student terms such as gasque; and foreign geographic names like Qatar.

The letter 'W' is rare. Before the 19th century, 'W' was interchangeable with 'V' ('W' was used in Fraktur, 'V' in Antiqua). Official orthographic standards since 1801 use only 'V' for common words. Many family names kept their 'W' despite the change to common words. Foreign words and names bring in uses of 'W', particularly combinations with webb for (World Wide) Web. Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated 'V' and 'W' as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a 'V' or a 'W'. The two letters' were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all 'V' (or all 'W'), until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista. By 2006, 'W' had grown in usage because of new loanwords, so 'W' officially became a letter, and the 'V' = 'W' sorting rule was deprecated. Pre-2006 books and software generally use the rule (unless the authors did not know about or chose not to implement this unusual rule). After the rule was deprecated, some books and software continued to apply it. Visual Studio 2010 documentation shows the rule still in effect. (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dictionary) declared a change.

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