Scandinavian/Nordic (Mainland)

This page covers utilities and codes for the modern languages of Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.

About the Scandinavian Letters

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.

Note: All the major Scandinavian languages are related to each other, except for Finnish.

Windows ALT Codes

In Windows, combinations of the ALT key plus a numeric code from the number keypad can be used to type a non-English character in any Windows application.

See the detailed instructions on the ALT Code How To for complete information on implementing the code. Additional options for entering accents in Windows are also listed in the Accents section of this Web site.

Windows International Keyboard Codes

In order to use these codes you must activate the U.S. international keyboard. Once the U.S. International keyboard has been activated, you can use the codes below.

Macintosh Accent Codes

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.

Example 1: To input the lower case ö, hold down the Option key, then the U key. Release both keys then type lowercase o.
Example 2: To input the capital Ö, hold down the Option key, then the U key. Release all three keys then type capital O.

HTML Accent Codes

Historical Encodings

Unicode (utf-8) is the preferred encoding for Web sites. However, the following historic encodings may still be encountered.

• iso-8859-1 (Latin 1),
• iso-8859-15 (adds support for the euro (€)
• win-1252

If possible, you should transition to Unicode.

Language Tags

Language Tags allow browsers and other software to process text more efficiently. They are also important for optimal screen reader accessibility.

• da (Danish)
• fi (Finnish)
• no (Norwegian)
• nb (Norwegian, Bokmål)
• nn (Norwegian, Nynorsk)
• sv (Swedish)

HTML Entity 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.

European Quote Marks

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.

Links

Linux/Unix

• Linux Accent Codes (English)
• Linux Danish International How To
• LinuxLinks Com – Scandinavian – Scroll down past ads