page_title: Finnish orthography
section_title: The extra letters Ä and Ö
hierarchical_section_title: Finnish orthography / Alphabet / The extra letters Ä and Ö
caption_attribution_description: English: The sign at the bus station of the Finnish town Mynämäki, illustrating a variation of the Latin letter Ä.
context_page_description: Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising 29 letters but also has two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet – although some discrepancies do exist.
context_section_description: The main peculiarities in the Finnish alphabet are the two extra vowel letters ä and ö (accompanied by the Swedish å, which is actually not needed for writing Finnish). In Finnish, these extra letters are collectively referred to as the ääkköset when they need to be distinguished from the ISO basic Latin alphabet; the word is a somewhat playful modification of aakkoset, which is the Finnish for the alphabet as a whole. Another informal term is skandit or skandimerkit, which is short for skandinaaviset merkit "Scandinavian characters" (however, the Danish and Norwegian variants æ and ø are usually not taken into account).
  In Finnish, the letters ä, ö and y are the  "front vowel" counterparts to the "back vowel" letters a, o and u — grammatical endings and word suffixes using these letters will use either the front or back form depending on the vowel harmony of the word they are affixed to. The glyphs for ä and ö are derived from the similar looking German umlauted letters, but as with y versus u, they are considered letters in their own right and thus alphabetized separately (after z).
  The Germanic umlaut or convention of considering digraph ae equivalent to ä, and oe equivalent to ö is inapplicable in Finnish. Moreover, in Finnish, both ae and oe are vowel sequences, not single letters, and they have independent meanings (e.g. haen "I seek" vs. hän "he, she").
  In handwritten text, the actual form of the extra marking may vary from a pair of dots to a pair of short vertical bars, to a single horizontal bar, or to a wavy line resembling a tilde. In practice, almost any diacritic situated above the base glyph (for example, á ā ã) would probably be interpreted as a carelessly written pair of dots (ä). However, in computerized character sets, these alternatives are incorrect. The front-vowel counterpart of u using the glyph y rather than ü is carried over from Swedish, and additionally avoids confusion in cursive script with ii, which is common in Finnish.
caption: The sign at the bus station of the Finnish town Mynämäki, illustrating a variation of the letter Ä.
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