This page covers utilities and codes for the modern languages of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.
See the Icelandic page for additional letters needed for Icelandic, Faeroese and Old Norse.
For historic reasons, the languages of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland use a similar set of characters. The characters not found in English are listed below by language.
| Languages | Additional Characters |
|---|---|
| Swedish/Finnish | Å,å,Ä,ä,Ö,ö |
| Danish/Norwegian | Å,å,Æ,æ,Ø,ø |
Note: All the major Scandinavian languages are related to each other, except for Finnish.
In Windows, combinations of the ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a non-English character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available. Additional options for entering accents in Windows are also listed in the Accents section of this Web site.
| Special Nordic Letters/Punct | |
| Æ | ALT+0198 (Capital ash) |
|---|---|
| æ | ALT+0230 (Lowercase ash) |
| Å | ALT+0197 (Capital A ring) |
| å | ALT+0229 (Lowercase A ring) |
| Ä | ALT+0196 (Capital A umlaut) |
| ä | ALT+0228 (Lowercase A umlaut) |
| Ø | ALT+0216 (Capital O slash) |
| ø | ALT+0248 (Lowercase O slash) |
| Ö | ALT+0214 (Capital O umlaut) |
| ö | ALT+0246 (Lowercase o slash) |
| « | ALT+0171 (Left Angle Quote) |
| » | ALT+0187 (Right Angle Quote) |
| € | ALT+0128 |
In order to use these codes you must activate the international keyboard. Instructions are listed in the Keyboards section of this Web site.
| Character | Code |
|---|---|
| æ, Æ | RightAlt+Z, Shift+RightAlt+Z (You must use the Alt key on the right) |
| å, Å | RightAlt+W, Shift+RightAlt+W |
| ø, Ø | RightAlt+L, Shift+RightAlt+L |
| Umlaut Accent ö,ä |
("+V) - Type double quote, then the vowel. |
| Consonants/Punctuation | |
| « | RightAlt+[ |
|---|---|
| » | RightAlt+] |
| € | Control+RightAlt+5 |
Below are the accent codes or "Option" codes for the mainland Scandinavian letters. For the Template, the symbol "V" means any vowel. The format is to hold the first two keys down simultaneously, release, then type the vowel you wish to be accented.
| Accent | Code |
|---|---|
| æ, Æ | Option+' (single quote) |
| å, Å | Option+A |
| ø, Ø | Option+O |
| Umlaut Accent ö,ä |
Type Option+U, then the vowel. |
| «, » | Option+\ |
| € | Shift+Option+2 |
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input accented letters in HTML. For instance, if you want to type Bokmål (lit: "book Norwegian") you would type Bokmål.
The numbers in parentheses are the numeric codes assigned in Unicode encoding. For instance, because å is number 229 3, Bokmål can also be used to input Bokmål. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
| Special Nordic Letters/Punct | |
| Æ | Æ (198) |
|---|---|
| æ | æ (230) |
| Å | Å (197) |
| å | å (229) |
| Ä | Ä (196) |
| ä | ä (228) |
| Ð | Ð (208)* |
| ð | ð (240)* |
| Ø | Ø (216) |
| ø | ø (248) |
| Ö | Ö (214) |
| ö | ö (246) |
| Þ | Þ (222)* |
| þ | þ (254)* |
Many modern texts use American style quotes, but if you wish to include European style quote marks, here are the codes. Note that these codes may not work in older browsers.
| Sym | HTMl Entity Code/th> |
|---|---|
| « | « (left angle) |
| » | » (right angle) | ‹ | ‹ (left single angle) |
| › | › (right single angle) | „ | „(bottom quote) | ‚ | ‚(single bottom quote) | “ | “(left curly quote) | ‘ | ‘(left single curly quote) | ” | ”(right curly quote) | ’ | ’(right single curly quote) | – | – (en dash) |
| — | — (em dash) |
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are metadata tags which indicate the language of a page, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
©Penn State University, 2000-2011.
This Web page maintained by Teaching and
Learning with Technology, a unit of Information
Technology Services. For questions or comments on this Web page, please
contact Elizabeth J. Pyatt (ejp10@psu.edu).
Unicode character names and hexadecimal entity codes are taken from the public Unicode Character Charts.