Å (letter)

Å or å (aa/å) is a letter that represents a vowel in the Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Istro-Romanian, Walloon and Chamorro alphabets.

In the Scandinavian languages and in some Teutonic dialects the word aa, ae or simply å (pronounced among Scandinavians frequently as a mixture from [a] and [o]; like an [o] in Swedish) is related to water (as in Åland) or a small watercourse (stream or small river in Swedish). In Danish and Norwegian, in addition to meaning stream, it has the value of the Spanish interjection "oh!".

On computers, using the ISO 8859-1 and Unicode standards, the characters "Å" and "å" They have the codes 0197 and 0229, respectively, or C5 and E5, in hexadecimal

Scandinavian languages

The letter Å represents in the Nordic alphabets the sound that in Spanish would be called closed. However, the letter can correspond to a long vowel (in general) or a short vowel (if followed by two consonants).

The letter has been used in Scandinavian languages since the adoption of the Latin alphabet in the Middle Ages, to the detriment of runes. Despite having been abandoned by Danish and Norwegian due to the influence of German and Dutch (where words with "aa" often correspond to Scandinavian words with "å", as, for example: haar in Dutch, it is hår in Norwegian -“hair” in Spanish-) was maintained by the Swede. The lyrics were reintroduced into Norwegian in 1917 and into Danish in 1948.

In Danish and Norwegian, "Aa" is considered equivalent to "Å" (for uppercase; "aa" lowercase equivalent of "å"), especially if typing on a keyboard where Å/å are not available. It is also a very common form in ancient names, whether geographical or personal. In general, the former have been re-adapted, but the latter have not (see, for example, the case of Ivar Aasen, father of Nynorsk).

In all three languages, the letter is placed at the end of the usual Latin alphabet, although in the case of Swedish it appears after "Z" (preceding "Ä" and "Ö") while in Norwegian and Danish "Æ" and "Ø" They precede it, being the last letter of the alphabet, which ends with "...Z, Æ, Ø, Å".

In the three Scandinavian languages, å has a meaning by itself, meaning "stream".

In Norwegian, it is also an infinitive mark: å synge (sing), å sove (sleep). Compared to English, it is equivalent to the particle "to", to talk (to speak); in Danish to "at", at tale (to speak) and in Swedish to "att", att tala (to speak). The same symbol å is used to represent the dialectal pronunciation of the infinitive mark att in Swedish: att sova, pronounced å sova (sleep).

In Czech

The "ring" is also used on the vowel u in Czech (ů) to denote a long u [uː], as in stůl [stuːl] ("table"). It is not found at the beginning of words, where it is preferred to use the acute accent, which is the generic way in Czech to represent the long vowels ú [uː].

This diacritic, called kroužek, was added during the XVI century to the devised signs by Jan Hus, such as the háček and the acute accent. Originally it was the abbreviation of the diphthong [uo] that ended up evolving into [uː] and became confused with the other long u, written ú. The spelling has been conservative at this point.