Swedish orthography

Swedish orthography is the set of rules and conventions used for writing Swedish. The primary authority on Swedish orthography is Svenska Akademiens ordlista (SAOL), a spelling dictionary published annually by the Swedish Academy. The balance between describing the language and creating norms has changed with the years. Orthography uses three distinct principles: phonologically oriented spelling, morphology-focused spelling, and traditional spelling. Through the history of written Swedish, these principles have been applied to various extents. Swedish spelling was long unregulated, but beginning in the later part of the 1700s, efforts increased to regulate spelling. In 1801, the Swedish Academy commissioned Afhandling om Svenska stafsättet, a treatise on Swedish spelling by poet Carl Gustaf af Leopold. The goal of the treatise was to create a more homogeneous spelling system, based on traditional spellings. Leopold also aimed to create more phonetic spellings for French loanwords. A later advocate for uniform spelling was Esaias Tegnér Jr. Swedish alphabet The Swedish alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet with 29 letters, including the modern 26-letter basic Latin alphabet, plus three extra letters : Å, Ä, and Ö. The letters Q, W, and Z are rarely used outside of loanwords and proper names. See Swedish alphabet for a detailed description of the sounds of the letters. Among phonological (sound-based) written languages such as Swedish, the degree of conformity between the graphemes of writing and phonemes of speech can vary. In Swedish, the written and spoken vowels agree well, but consonants vary significantly more. For example, there are several different graphemes for the sj-sound (as in själ, skäl, and stjäl) and the tj-sound (as in kära and tjära). This is because Swedish consonants adhere in large part to a traditional orthography, which reflects an older spoken language. Phonologically oriented (sound-oriented) spelling holds that every phoneme should correspond to a single grapheme.