Swedish alphabet

The runes underwent partial "latinization" in the Middle Ages, when the Latin alphabet was completely accepted as the Swedish script system, but runes still occurred, especially in the countryside, until the 18th century, and were used decoratively until mid 19th century.

[4] Some proper names kept their ⟨q⟩ despite the change to common words: Qvist, Quist, Husqvarna, Quenby, Quinby, Quintus, Quirin and Quirinus.

[citation needed] Foreign words and names bring in uses of ⟨w⟩, particularly combinations with webb for (World Wide) Web.

Swedish sorting traditionally and officially treated ⟨v⟩ and ⟨w⟩ as equivalent, so that users would not have to guess whether the word, or name, they were seeking was spelled with a ⟨v⟩ or a ⟨w⟩.

The two letters were often combined in the collating sequence as if they were all ⟨v⟩ or all ⟨w⟩, until 2006 when the 13th edition of Svenska Akademiens ordlista (The Swedish Academy's Orthographic Dictionary) declared a change.

The news agency TT follows this usage because some newspapers have no technical support for ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨ø⟩,[12] although there is a recommendation to use ⟨æ⟩ and ⟨ø⟩.

The letter ⟨æ⟩ was used in earlier Swedish script systems, when there was in general more similarity between the Scandinavian languages.

In text the dots should be clearly separated, but in handwriting writers frequently replace them with a macron ⟨◌̄⟩: ⟨ō⟩, ⟨ā⟩.

Due to several phonetic combinations coalescing over recent centuries, the spelling of the Swedish sje-sound is very eclectic.