Summary
Ø (or minuscule: ø) is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as ø and œ, except for Southern Sámi where it is used as an [oe] diphthong. The name of this letter is the same as the sound it represents (see usage). Among English-speaking typographers the symbol may be called a "slashed O" or "o with stroke". Although these names suggest it is a ligature or a diacritical variant of the letter o, it is considered a separate letter in Danish and Norwegian, and it is alphabetized after "z" — thus x, y, z, æ, ø, and å. In other languages that do not have the letter as part of the regular alphabet, or in limited character sets such as ASCII, "ø" may correctly be replaced with the digraph "oe", although in practice it is often replaced with just an "o", e.g. in email addresses. It is equivalent to the letter "ö" used in Swedish (and a number of other languages), and may also be replaced with "ö", as was often the case with older typewriters in Denmark and Norway, and in national extensions of International Morse Code. "ø" (minuscule) is also used in the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent a close-mid front rounded vowel. In modern Danish, Faroese, and Norwegian, the letter is a monophthongal close-mid front rounded vowel, the IPA symbol for which is also [ø] (Unicode U+00F8). As with so many vowels, it has slight variations of "light" quality (in Danish, søster ("sister") is pronounced as [ø], like the "eu" in the French word bleu) and "dark" quality (in Danish, bønne ("bean") is pronounced as [œ], like the "œu" in the French word bœuf). Listen to a Danish speaker reciting the Danish alphabet. In the Suðuroy-dialect of Faroese, the short ø is pronounced [ʏ], e.g. børn [bʏdn] ("children"). The letter was used in both Antiqua and Fraktur from at least as early as the Christian III Bible. Under German influence, the letter ö appeared in older texts (particularly those using Fraktur) and was preferred for use on maps (e.
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