Å as a word means "small river" in Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian and can be found in place names.īefore 1917, when spelling with the double A was common, some Norwegian place names contained three or four consecutive A letters: for instance Haaa (now Håa, a river) and Blaaaasen ( Blååsen, 'the blue ("blå") ridge ("ås")'). Official rules allow both forms in the most common cases, but Å is always correct. Locals of Aalborg and Aabenraa resist the Å, whereas Ålesund is rarely seen with Aa spelling. In some place names, the old Aa spelling dominates, more often in Denmark than in Norway (where it has been abolished in official use since 1917). The short variation of Faroese á is pronounced, though. The Old Norse letter á is retained, but the sound it now expresses is a diphthong, pronounced in Icelandic and in Faroese. Icelandic and Faroese are the only North Germanic languages not to use the å. However, the city has changed to the Aa spelling starting 2011, in a controversial decision citing internationalization and web compatibility advantages. Between 19, the city of Aarhus was officially spelled Århus. Aalborg and Aabenraa however, Ålborg and Åbenrå are the spellings recommended by the Danish Language Board. In a few names of Danish cities or towns, the old spelling has been retained as an option due to local resistance, e.g. Danish had been the only language apart from German and Luxembourgish to use capitalized nouns in the last decades, but abolished them at the same occasion. According to Jørgen Nørby Jensen, senior consultant at Dansk Sprognævn, the cause for the change in Denmark was a combination of anti-German and pro-Nordic sentiment. Orthography reforms making Å official were carried out in Norway in 1917 and in Denmark in 1948. Aa was usually treated as a single letter, spoken like the present Å when spelling out names or words. Most people felt no need for the new letter, although the letter group Aa had already been pronounced like Å for centuries in Denmark and Norway. In an attempt to modernize the orthography, linguists tried to introduce the Å to Danish and Norwegian writing in the 19th century. It was first used in print in the Gustav Vasa Bible that was published in 1541 and replaced Aa in the 16th century. A minuscule O was placed on top of an A to create a new letter. A similar process was used to construct a new grapheme where an "aa" had previously been used. They later evolved into the modern letters Ä and Ö, where the E was simplified into the two dots now referred to as umlaut. Instead of using ligatures, a minuscule (that is, lower-case) E was placed above the letters A and O to create new graphemes. In Old Swedish the use of the ligature Æ and of Ø (originally also a variant of the ligature Œ) that represented the sounds and respectively were gradually replaced by new letters. Medieval writing often used doubled letters for long vowels, and the vowel continued to be written Aa. Historically, the å derives from the Old Norse long /aː/ vowel (spelled with the letter á), but over time, it developed to an sound in most Scandinavian language varieties (in Swedish and Norwegian, it has eventually reached the pronunciation ).
The Å-sound originally had the same origin as the long /aː/ sound in German Aal and Haar ( Scandinavian ål, hår).
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