I promised in a comment to write about the three additional letters we have in the Swedish alphabet, so here it is. Yes it’s true we have three more letters after A to Z as in the English alphabet. Åå, Ää and Öö. Not to be show off’s, they have these with a different spelling, and pronunciation, in Danish and Norwegian also. Let’s just say it’s a Scandinavian thing.

Lets start with Å. A friend of mine tried to explain this in a London pub when we were young backpackers. “It’s an a with a prick on”, he said. Took a while to figure out why the men laughed and the girls blushed. Dot is in Swedish “prick”. It is pronounced as ooh. Even for native Swedish it’s sometimes difficult to know when to use O or Å.

Moving on to the A with two pricks on, Ä. Pronounced eah. If you have sheep close by listen to them, they go bäää. Use Google translate to listen. Just copy from this text and paste in Google translate. Very common use and a real struggle for all English speakers moving to Sweden.

So the last letter the O with two pricks on, Ö. This is actually also an entire word that translates to island. You just have to listen to this on Google. There is nothing even close in English that I can think of. I think this is a happy little letter. Used to drive my teacher crazy when I made a smiley of it.

Just remember that sometimes less is more, ha de Gött!

• National Day
• Acrobat
• Smooth rock
• Spring green
• Backlit