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"Å", or "å", is a letter, representing a vowel, in the Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Walloon, Chamorro and Istro-Romanian language alphabets. In Finnish, "Å" is used only in Scandinavian names. Other alphabets using the letter include Greenlandic, Lule Sami, Skolt Sami and Southern Sami alphabet. The letter "Å" is often perceived as an "A" with a ring, interpreting the ring as a diacritical mark. However, the ring is not a diacritic. Rather, the letter developed as a form of semi-ligature of an "A" with a small "a" above it to denote the changed sound value, similar to how the umlaut mark "¨" is developed from a small "e" written above the letter in question. The letter "Å" replaced "Aa" in 16th century in German and Swedish. However, "Å" is no longer used in German.
Nordic languages The letter Å in Nordic alphabets represents two sounds, a short and a long. The letter has been used in Scandinavian languages since medieval times when the futhark was exchanged for the Latin alphabet and it is remnant of Odal-rune. In Old Norse the sound was written á. Although it was abandoned in Danish and Norwegian owing to German influence, it was retained in Swedish. The letter Å was re-introduced in Norwegian in 1917 and in Danish in 1948. In Danish and Norwegian languages, "Aa" is considered equivalent to "Å", inasmuch as "Aa" is the old symbol for Å, and a fully functional transcription for "Å" when using a foreign typewriter. In surnames, and occasionally in names of geographical places, the old symbol "Aa" is retained. Correct alphabetisation in Danish and Norwegian places "Aa" along with "Å" as the last letter in the alphabet. Å is sometimes transliterated as Á in the Faroese and Icelandic alphabets (usually in proper names), even though Á represents different diphthongs in their respective languages. In the Swedish alphabet, "Å" is sorted immediately after "Z", as the third letter from the end. (The sequence after "Z" is "Å, Ä, Ö".) In the Finnish alphabet, "Å" is treated as in Swedish, but its usage is limited to names of Swedish origin. In Norwegian and Danish, "Z" is followed by the sequence "Æ, Ø, Å". In the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish languages, å is also a word, meaning a rivulet, a stream or a small river, like the rivers Aa, Au and Aue on the European continent. (See also Bourne Eau.) In standard Norwegian and frequently in spoken Swedish it is also the mark for infinitive: å ta = "to take". Walloon writing Å was introduced to some local variants of eastern-Walloon dialect at the beginning of the 20th century, initially to note the same sound as in Danish. Its use quickly spread to all the eastern-Walloon dialects, through the cultural influence of the city of Liège, and covered three different sounds, a long open o, a long close o, or a long a, depending on the local varieties. The use of a single å letter to cover those different pronunciations has been embraced by the new pan-Walloon orthography, that systemizes a unique orthography for words that are the same, regardless of the local phonetic variations. In non-standardized writings outside the Liège area, words containing the å letter are written with au, â or ô depending on the pronunciation. For example the word måjhon (house) in standardized orthography is written môjo, mâhon, mohone, maujon in dialectal writings. Istro-Romanian writing The Istro-Romanian alphabet is based on the standard Romanian alphabet with three additional letters used to mark sounds specific only to this dialect å, ľ and ń. The third sound å is a uniquely IstroRomanian sound close to the English sound wa in water. Symbol for ångström The letter "Å" is also used throughout the world as the international symbol for the non-SI unit ångström, a physical unit of length named after the Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Ångström. It is always upper case in this context. Unicode also has encoded U+212B for the Ångström symbol. However, that is canonically equivalent to the ordinary letter Å. The duplicate encoding at U+212B is due to round-trip mapping compatibility with an East-Asian character encoding, and should be seen as a mistake not to be used. On computers For computers, when using the ISO 8859-1 or Unicode sets, the codes for "Å" and "å" are respectively 197 and 229, or C5 and E5 in hexadecimal. In (X)HTML character entity references, required in cases where the letter is not available by ordinary coding, the codes are Å and å; or & and &,
which also can used in any XML application (when the letter is not directly available in the character encoding used).On an X window system with Compose key enabled, press Compose and then aa, or Compose and then a To type "å" with an US-International keyboard layout on Microsoft Windows, hold the right-Alt and the "w" key, and the Å in the same way with the addition of the Shift key . Or hold the Alt key and type 0197 or 143 on the numeric keypad for "Å", and for "å" hold the Alt key and type 0229 or 134 on the numeric keypad. To type "Å" with an Apple Computer using a US keyboard layout, hold the Option key and the Shift key simultaneously and type the A key. To type "å" with an Apple Computer, hold the Option key and type the A key. See also | ||||||||
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