Danish orthography

Danish orthography is the system and norms used for writing the Danish language, including spelling and punctuation. Officially, the norms are set by the Danish language council through the publication of Retskrivningsordbogen. Danish currently uses a 29-letter Latin-script alphabet with an additional three letters: Æ, Ø and Å. It is identical to the Norwegian alphabet. The orthography is characterized by a low degree of correspondence between writing and pronunciation. There were spelling reforms in 1872, 1889 (with some changes in 1892), and 1948. These spelling reforms were based in the decisions of the Nordic spelling conference of 1869, whose goal was to abolish spellings that are justified by neither phonetics nor etymology and to bring Danish and Swedish orthographies closer. The reform of 1872 replaced the letter by in some words (Eg> Æg, fegte> fægte, Hjelm> Hjælm; however, for words with the change was reverted in 1889), abolished the distinction of the homophonous words Thing and Ting (however, the distinction between thi and ti was retained), replaced the letter by (Qvinde>Kvinde), deleted the silent after vowels (faae>faa), abolished doubling of vowels to signify vowel length (Steen>Sten), replaced by after vowels (Vei>Vej), and introduced some smaller spelling changes. In some cases, spelling of loanwords was simplified, but in general the question of spelling loanwords was largely left undecided. In 1889, was abolished from native words and most loanwords: Oxe>Okse, Exempel>Eksempel. The letter was deleted from the combinations gje, gjæ, gjø, kje, kjæ, kjø: Kjøkken>Køkken. Additionally, spelling of loanwords was standardized. In some cases, simplified spellings were adopted ( sounded mostly becomes ; in words of Greek origin are replaced by ), but in many cases original spellings were retained. Danish formerly used both (in Fraktur) and (in Antiqua), though it was suggested to use for /ø/ and for /œ/, which was also sometimes employed.