Aa was usually treated as a single letter, spoken like the present Å when spelling out names or words.

According to Jørgen Nørby Jensen, senior consultant at Dansk Sprognævn, the cause for the change in Denmark was a combination of anti-German and pro-Nordic sentiment.

However, the city has reverted to the Aa spelling starting 2011, in a controversial decision citing internationalization and web compatibility advantages.

The Old Norse letter á is retained, but the sound it now expresses is a diphthong, pronounced [au] in Icelandic and [ɔa] in Faroese.

Å as a word means "small river" in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian and can be found in place names.

Before 1917, when spelling with the double A was common, some Norwegian place names contained three or four consecutive A letters: for instance Haaa (now Håa, a river) and Blaaaasen (Blååsen, 'the blue ("blå") ridge ("ås")').

Unless manually corrected, sorting algorithms of programs localized for Danish or Norwegian place e.g., Aaron after Zorro.

Alternative spellings of the Scandinavian Å have become a concern because of globalization, and particularly because of the popularization of the World Wide Web.

This is to a large extent due to the fact that prior to the creation of IDNA system around 2005, internet domains containing Scandinavian letters were not recognized by the DNS, and anyway do not feature on keyboards adapted for other languages.

Even so, representing the Å as just an A is particularly common in Sweden, as compared to Norway and Denmark, because the spelling Aa has no traditional use there.

In Emilian, å is used to represent the open-mid back unrounded vowel [ʌ], like the RP pronunciation of ⟨u⟩ in "up", e.g. Modenese dialect åmm, dånna [ˈʌmː], [ˈdʌnːa] "man, woman"; e.g. Bolognese dialect Bulåggna, dåpp [buˈlʌɲːa] [ˈdʌpː] "Bologna, later".

The letter å was introduced to some eastern local variants of Walloon at the beginning of the 16th century and initially noted the same sound as in Danish.

In non-standardized writings outside the Liege area, words containing å are written with au / ô (representing the same sound) or â.

For example, the word måjhon (house) in the standardized orthography is spelled môjo(n), mâhon, maujon in dialectal writings (mohone is another form that does not contain a long å).

The logo of the Stargate series similarly features a stylized A with a circle above it, making it resemble an Å as in Stargåte; in Norwegian, gåte means "riddle".

Cirque du Soleil's Koozå production uses this character in its logo, although it is pronounced by the main singer as a regular "a".

The American rock band CKY use the letter Å on the cover of their 2005 album An Answer Can Be Found.