Danish and Norwegian alphabet
The Danish and Norwegian alphabet, called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, is based on the Latin alphabet and has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish): The letters C, Q, W, X and Z are not used in the spelling of indigenous words. They are rarely used in Norwegian, where loan words routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system. Conversely, Danish has a greater tendency to preserve loan words' original spellings. In particular, a 'c' that represents is almost never normalized to 's' in Danish, as would most often  happen in Norwegian. Many words originally derived from Latin roots retain 'c' in their Danish spelling, for example Norwegian "sentrum" vs Danish "centrum". The "foreign" letters also sometimes appear in the spelling of otherwise-indigenous family names. For example, many of the Danish families that use the surname "Skov" (literally: "Forest") spell it "Schou". Diacritics. Danish. Standard Danish orthography has no compulsory diacritics, but allows the use of an acute accent for disambiguation. Most often, an accent on "e" marks a stressed syllable in one of a pair of homographs that have different stresses, for example "en dreng" (a boy ) versus "én dreng" (one boy) or "alle" (every/everyone) versus "allé" (avenue). Less often, any vowel including "å" may be accented to indicate stress on a "word", either to clarify the meaning of the sentence, or to ease the reading otherwise. For example: "jeg stód op" ("I was standing"), versus "jeg stod óp" ("I got out of bed"); "hunden gør (det)" ("the dog does (it)"), versus "hunden gǿr" ("the dog barks"). Most often, however, such distinctions are made using typographical emphasis (italics, underlining) or simply left to the reader to infer from the context, and the use of accents in  such cases may appear dated. A common context in which the explicit acute accent is preferred is to disambiguate "en"/"et" ("a", indefinite article) and "én"/"ét" ("one", numeral) in central places in official written materials, such as advertising, where clarity is important. Norwegian. Nynorsk uses several letters with diacritic signs: é, è, ê, ó, ò, â, and ô. The diacritic signs are not compulsory, but can be added to clarify the meaning of words (homonyms) that would otherwise be identical. One example is "ein gut" ("a boy") versus "éin gut" ("one boy"). Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably  ü, á, à and é, following the conventions of the original language. The Norwegian vowels æ, ø and å never take diacritics. Bokmål is mostly spelled without diacritic signs. The only exception is one word of Norwegian origin, namely "fôr", to be distinguished from "for" (see below) as well as any subsequent compound words, eg "kåpefôr" (coat lining) and "dyrefôr" (animal feed). There are also a small number of words in Norwegian which use the acute accent. The words are "allé" (avenue), "diaré" (diarrhea), "kafé" (cafe), "idé" (idea), "entré" (entrance), "komité" (committee), "kupé" (compartment), "moské" (mosque), "supé" (supper), "trofé" (trophy ) and "diskré" (discreet). An acute accent can also be used to differentiate "en" (a) from "én" (one) eg. "én gutt" (one boy) "en gutt" (a boy). The diacritic signs in use include the acute accent, grave accent and the circumflex. A common example of how the diacritics change the meaning of a word, is "for": Also used is the cedille, but only on a c in loanwords, indicating the c should be pronounced as an s. A macron-like diacritic can be used for decorative purposes both in handwritten and computed Bokmål and Nynorsk or to denote vowel length such  as in dū (you), lā (infinitive form of to let), lēser (present form of "to read") and lūft (air). The diacritic is entirely optional, carries no IPA value and is seldom used in modern Norwegian outside of handwriting. History. The letter "Å" (HTML &aring;) was introduced in Norwegian in 1917, replacing "Aa" or "aa". The new letter came from the Swedish alphabet, where it has been in official use since the 16th century. Similarly, the letter "Å" was introduced in Danish in 1948, but the final decision on its place in the alphabet was not made. The initial proposal was  to place it first, before "A". Its place as the last letter of the alphabet, as in Norwegian, was decided in 1955. The former digraph "Aa" still occurs in personal names, and in Danish geographical names. In Norway, geographical names tend to follow the current orthography, meaning that the letter "å" will be used. Family names may not follow modern orthography, and therefore retain the digraph "aa" where "å" would be used today. "Aa" remains in use as a transliteration, if the letter is not available for technical reasons. "Aa" is treated like "Å" in alphabetical sorting, not like two  adjacent letters "A", meaning that while "a" is the first letter of the alphabet, "aa" is the last. In Norwegian (but not in Danish), this rule does not apply to non-Scandinavian names, so a modern atlas would list the German city of Aachen under "A", but list the Danish town of Aabenraa under "Å". In Danish, the "aa" rule is applied, as long as it denotes one sound, for example German Aachen or Dutch kraal, but if it denotes 2 sounds like in "ekstraarbejde" (extra work), the two "a"s are sorted as two. The difference between the Dano-Norwegian  and the Swedish alphabet is that Swedish uses the variant "Ä" instead of "Æ", and the variant "Ö" instead of "Ø", similarly to German. Also, the collating order for these three letters is different in Swedish: "Å, Ä, Ö". "Æ" and "Ä" are sorted together in all Scandinavian languages, as well as Finnish, and so are "Ø" and "Ö". In current Danish and Norwegian, "W" is recognized as a separate letter from "V". In Danish, the transition was made in 1980; before that, the "W" was merely considered to be a variation of the letter "V" and words using it  were sometimes alphabetized accordingly (e.g., "Wandel, Vandstad, Wanscher, Varberg" in "Dansk Biografisk Leksikon", 1904). The Danish version of the Alphabet song still states that the alphabet has 28 letters; the last line reads "otte-og-tyve skal der stå", i.e. "that makes twenty-eight". However, today, the letter "w" is considered an official letter. Computing standards. In computing, several different coding standards have existed for this alphabet: