This unified alphabet was approved in 2007 (without the letter C) as a replacement for the separate Olonets Karelian and Karelian Proper alphabets. The letters Ä and Ö are vowels which, unlike the German umlauts, are considered to be distinct and are alphabetized separately from the corresponding vowels without the umlauts. The postalveolar consonants Č, Š and Ž can be replaced by the digraphs Ch, Sh and Zh when writing the caron is impossible or inconvenient—for example ruočči (Swedish) may be written as ruochchi.
