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Comment by joshdavham

17 hours ago

> preferably contain the letters Å, Ä or Ö

Yes, but why prefer these letters?

I don’t know Swedish. Is it because these diacritics make the names seem more exotic?

35 comments

joshdavham

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Snild  16 hours ago

Those are the letters we have that are distinct from English. Not exotic to us, but yeah, "weird letters" is probably considered part of the international brand now.

By the way, we consider them unique letters, not A and O with diacritics. The Swedish alphabet goes …XYZÅÄÖ.

Oh, and I just learned that we only officially added W in 2006. Before that, it was considered a variant of V. We still pronounce them the same, which is why many swedes will mix them up when speaking English. Mostly in the W->V direction, but I've heard the opposite happen too.

  • jillesvangurp  7 hours ago

    I lived in Sweden in the late nineties. The local phone book had my Dutch name sorted under the V & W section because it has the word 'van' (means of in English) in it. In the Netherlands my name would be in the G section (van Gurp) because otherwise most of the phone book would have to be sorted under the V, which would defeat the purpose of sorting.

  • bonoboTP  16 hours ago

    Huh, interesting that they are collated at the end. These differences also makes sorting language dependent.

    In Hungarian it's A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F... So Cu--- comes before Cs---

    • vidarh  13 hours ago

      Just to make things worse, the Scandinavian languages use different versions of what have historically been the same letters, and collate them differently. E.g. Norwegian has æ (Ä), ø (Ö), å, collated in that order. Technically the Swedish variants are not part of the Norwegian alphabet, but they're typically collated with their modern Norwegian equivalents.

      At least in Norwegian, ae, oe, and aa is also traditionally collated as if they were using these letters, so a word starting "aa" comes at the end of the alphabet, after z, oe and ae....

      3 replies →

    • xigoi  15 hours ago

      Even worse, in Czech it’s

      A B C Č D Ď E F G H Ch I J…

      • „če“ goes after both „ca“ and „ci“, but „ác“ goes between „ab“ and „ad“

      • „cha“ goes after „da“ and „ha“

devsda  16 hours ago

Not sure why, but when I see certain diacritics with latin alphabet, my brain tries to place the language somewhere in Europe. I don't know if I can call that an exotic feeling but it certainly feels foreign.

mihaelm  16 hours ago

I guess it helps with emphasizing their Swedish identity, which is one of their goals with naming. Doesn't gel too well with "feels good to say" for a non-native speaker, but I see their point.

  • z2  7 hours ago

    Yeah, given they sell to every continent, I find it utterly impossible they truly tested this with each of the dozens to hundreds of languages their customers speak.

dhosek  16 hours ago

Most likely. In the early 90s there was a knock-off of Ikea called Stør which used the ø for exoticism. I had assumed that it was a Danish company, but apparently, not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STØR (The store where I bought some of my first furniture from—off the 60 in City of Industry—was quite possibly the original location).