Danish and Norwegian alphabet

The Danish and Norwegian alphabets is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It 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 /s/ 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 (meaning 'forest') spell it Schou.

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⟩.