You can’t expect to learn a language (let alone three) to travel to Scandinavia, but at least you can take a moment to learn how to pronounce and type names.
Europeans in general pronounce the letters a, e, and i differently from Americans.
- The letter a is not pronounced like fat but like car.
- The letter e is not pronounced like ten but like ferry.
- The letter i is not pronounced like ice or like pin but like the first i in spirit.
To Americans, the most unfamiliar aspect of Scandinavian languages is the system of diacritics, those accent marks in and around the letters.
- Two dots above ä letter is called an umlaut.
- One circle above å letter is called a ring.
- “ø” may be called “slashed o”
- The”ae” mashup “æ” is called ash.
Letters with diacritics are considered their own characters, and they are part of the Scandinavian alphabets. They come at the very end of the alphabet, after z! The diacritic letters that appear most commonly in Scandinavian names are ä, å, ö, and ø.
The umlaut-a, ä, is what we would call a “short a,” as in ash. It is used more commonly in Swedish. Sometimes the Norwegians use æ for the same sound.
Ring-a, å, is pronounced oh. Think about the ring as a reminder.
Umlaut-o, ö, does not have an English equivalent. It is pronounced as in German. To make this sound, you say “oh” with your lips and “ee” with your tongue at the same time! If you do it right, it will sound like you’re talking with your finger in your mouth! The Swedes make more use of ö, while the Norwegians use the ø symbol for the same sound. This is unfortunate, because the suffix -øy for island is very common in Norwegian and is difficult for Americans to master.
The Germans also have an umlaut-u, ü. To make this sound, you say “oo” with your lips and “ee” with your tongue. Scandinavians make this same sound with the letter y.
To type these letters, you need a keyboard with a number pad. Press and hold down the alt key, type the character code on the number pad, and then release alt. The special character magically appears! Here are the codes:
ä = 132
å = 134
Ä = 142
Å = 143
æ= 0230
Æ = 0198
ö = 148
ø = 0248
Ö = 153
Ø = 0216
ü = 129
Ü = 154
ÿ = 152
Ÿ = 0159
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