Ökirjaimet

Ökirjaimet, or “ö letters,” refer to the letter ö and its uppercase Ö, a vowel with a diaeresis. In several European alphabets, ö is treated as a separate letter rather than a mere variant of o, and it has its own place in the alphabet order.

Ö is used in Finnish, Swedish, German, Turkish, Hungarian, Icelandic, and many loanwords in other languages. In Finnish and Swedish, ä and ö are standard vowels that form part of the core orthography of the languages. The letter often appears in common words and meanings that differ from those formed with o or a.

Phonetically, ö typically represents a front rounded vowel, commonly transcribed as [ø] in IPA. The exact realization can vary by language and dialect: Finnish usually has a close to mid [ø], while German and Turkish may show a similar rounded front vowel, sometimes slightly longer or differing in height depending on context.

Orthographically, ö is treated as a distinct letter in the affected alphabets. It is not simply a variant of o, and it participates in alphabetic ordering and dictionary sorting according to the rules of each language.

Typing and encoding: in Unicode, ö is U+00F6 and Ö is U+00D6. On most computer keyboards, ö can be entered via language-specific layouts or using special input methods: Windows often via Alt codes, macOS via option-u followed by o, and mobile keyboards via long-press on the letter o to select ö.

Examples of usage include Finnish öljy (oil), Swedish öga (eye), and German können (can). The ö remains a distinctive and widely used feature of several languages written with the Latin alphabet.