Finnish Alphabet - Alphabetical Order

Alphabetical Order

In Finnish, words are ordered alphabetically according to the collation rules specified in the official standard SFS 4600. There are a few cases where Finnish collation is different from the rules applied in English:

• å, ä and ö are regarded distinct letters and collated after z
• w is generally regarded equivalent to v (in a multilingual context it may, however, be collated separately after v, as in English).

Diacritics are never added to letters in native Finnish words (as the dots above the Finnish graphemes ä and ö are not considered diacritics). Generally, diacritics are retained in foreign-language proper names, e.g. Vilén, if possible, but when arranging words alphabetically, diacritics are usually ignored (this also applies to š and ž, despite them being an officially recognized part of Finnish orthography). There are, however, some exceptions:

• German ü and Hungarian ű are alphabetized as y, not as u
• Danish and Norwegian ø, Estonian õ and Hungarian ő are alphabetized as ö, not as o.

The standard does not specify how one should alphabetize the letter ü when used in other languages than German, but at least as regards the Estonian or Hungarian ü, it seems consistent to treat it as equivalent to y (and even more so, since ü in Estonian and Hungarian is not considered a mere variant of u, as it is in German). It would seem problematic, however, to apply the same principle to e.g. ü (u-diaeresis) as used in Spanish or õ (nasal vowel) as used in Portuguese, as these letters represent quite different orthographic traditions.

Other special cases:

• Sami ŋ (eng) is alphabetized as n
• Sami đ (d with stroke) and Icelandic ð (eth) are alphabetized as d
• Icelandic þ (thorn) is alphabetized as th
• Polish ł (l with stroke) is alphabetized as l.

Ligatures are alphabetized as two individual letters:

• æ is alphabetized as ae (not as ä)
• œ is alphabetized as oe (not as ö)
• ß is alphabetized as ss.

Letters and characters taken from other alphabets (e.g. Σ 'Greek capital letter sigma') or writing systems are collated after Latin letters.