The Swedish Alphabet

The Swedish alphabet has 29 letters: the familiar 26 of the Latin alphabet, plus three extra letters — å, ä, ö — added at the very end, after z. This page is about the inventory and the order of those letters: what they are called and how they sort. The sounds they make belong to the Pronunciation group; here we care about spelling them, naming them, and — the part almost every course skips — putting them in the right order.

That last point matters more than it looks. If you treat å, ä, ö as decorated versions of a and o, every dictionary lookup, every alphabetised list, every contact list sorted "A to Ö" will defeat you. Getting the order right is the difference between finding öl in a dictionary and giving up because you looked under o.

The 29 letters in order

Here is the full alphabet, in Swedish dictionary order:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z å ä ö

The first 26 are exactly the English alphabet in the usual order. Then come the three Swedish letters, always in this fixed sequence: å, then ä, then ö. They are not slotted in next to a or o — they live at the end, a self-contained tail on the alphabet.

The letter names

You need the letter names to spell out loud — for your name on the phone, a booking reference, an email address. Most are close to their English counterparts, but the vowel names follow Swedish vowel values, so they are worth learning explicitly.

Note two names in particular: W is dubbel-veh, literally "double-v" — a clue to its history, below — and Z is spelled zäta but said with an s-sound (Swedish has no /z/), not "zee" or "zed." When you spell your email aloud, these are the ones that trip up learners.

Why the three extra letters are real letters

This is the single most important idea on the page. In Swedish, å, ä, ö are not a, o with decorations — they are independent letters with their own place in the alphabet, the way English treats i and j as two letters even though j grew out of i. You cannot drop the ring or the dots any more than you could drop the dot on an English i and call it an l.

Two consequences flow from this:

1. They never merge with a or o when sorting. A word starting with ä comes after every word starting with z, not next to the a-words.
2. They change meaning. Swapping a for å, or a for ä, gives you a different word, not a misspelling of the same one. The dedicated page Writing å, ä, and ö covers this with minimal pairs; for now, just absorb that they are full citizens of the alphabet.

The marginal letters: q, w, x, z

Four letters earn their keep almost entirely in loanwords and proper names:

• q appears in names (Qvist, an old spelling of Kvist) and a few borrowings; native Swedish uses kv instead (kvinna "woman," kväll "evening").
• w is historically the most interesting. For centuries Swedish treated w as a mere variant of v, and many older dictionaries and phone books interfiled w and v as a single letter. The 13th edition of the standard spelling dictionary (Svenska Akademiens ordlista, 2006) finally separated them, so modern dictionaries sort w in its own slot between v and x. You will still meet the old merged order in older references and library catalogues. The letter's name, dubbel-veh, preserves the memory of when it was "just a doubled v."
• x is used (taxi, extra), but native words often prefer ks (växa "to grow" keeps the x, but many words use ks).
• z is essentially only in loanwords and names (zoo, zon, pizza, Zlatan). Native Swedish has no /z/ sound at all, so the letter is pronounced like s.

Sorting in practice

The payoff. Suppose you have these words and need to alphabetise them: zoo, äta, bil, att, öl, åka. An English speaker's instinct files äta near a and öl near o. That is wrong in Swedish. The correct order is:

att → bil → zoo → åka → äta → öl

The three a–z words come first in ordinary order (att, bil, zoo — note zoo still beats anything starting with å). Then the tail: every å-word, then every ä-word, then every ö-word.

Swedish ≠ German ordering

If you have studied German, unlearn its sorting now. German also has ä, ö (and ü, plus ß), but it interfiles them: ä sorts as if it were ae (so right after a), ö as oe, ü as ue. Swedish does the opposite — it gives å, ä, ö their own places at the end and never folds them back into a or o. So a German-trained instinct to file öl near o is exactly the trap to avoid. Two languages, two opposite conventions; the Swedish one is "extra letters at the end."

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Swedish has 29 letters: a–z plus å, ä, ö at the end, always in that order.
• å, ä, ö are distinct letters, not accented a/o — they sort after z and they change word meaning.
• The dictionary/phonebook order ends …x, y, z, å, ä, ö; learn that tail as a chant.
• q, w, x, z are mostly loanword and name letters; w was long merged with v (hence its name dubbel-veh) and only got its own dictionary slot in 2006.
• Swedish sorting is the opposite of German: German interfiles ä/ö with a/o; Swedish keeps them separate at the end.