Swedish orthography

Swedish orthography is the set of rules and conventions used for writing Swedish. The primary authority on Swedish orthography is Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL), a glossary published annually by the Swedish Academy. The balance between describing the language and creating norms has changed with the years.

Within orthography are three distinct principles that are used: phonologically oriented spelling, morphology-focused spelling, and traditional spelling. Through the history of written Swedish, these principles have been applied to various extents. Swedish spelling was long unregulated, but beginning in the later part of the 1700s, efforts increased to regulate spelling. In 1801, the Swedish Academy commissioned Afhandling om Svenska stafsättet, a treatise on Swedish spelling by poet Carl Gustaf af Leopold. The goal of the treatise was to create a more homogeneous spelling system, based on traditional spellings. Leopold also aimed to create more phonetic spellings for French loanwords. A later advocate for the importance of uniform spelling was Esaias Tegnér Jr.

Among phonological (sound-based) written languages such as Swedish, the degree of conformity between the graphemes of writing and phonemes of speech can vary. In Swedish, the written and spoken vowels agree well, but consonants vary significantly more. For example, there are several different graphemes for the  Sj-sound, (as in själ, skäl, and stjäl) and the tje-sound (as in kära and tjära). This is because Swedish consonants adhere in large part to a traditional orthography, which reflects an older spoken language.

Phonologically oriented (sound oriented) spelling holds that every phoneme should correspond to a single grapheme. An example of pure phonological spelling is the word har. The word's three graphemes, ⟨har⟩, each correspond to a single phoneme, /har/. In Swedish, phonological spelling is used for vowels, with two exceptions. The most important exception is that the two graphemes ⟨e⟩ and ⟨ä⟩ are both used to indicate /ɛː/ and /ɛ/, and that the grapheme ⟨o⟩ is used for the phonemes /oː/ and /ɔ/, but also for /uː/ and /ʊ/. In this last case the grapheme <o> is pronounced differently in different words. Another exception is in loanwords such as bag or jeep. Graphemes and phonemes do not correspond as well for consonants as for vowels.

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