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Writing system and alphabet

The oldest preserved examples of written Danish (from the Iron and Viking Ages) are in the Runic alphabet. The introduction of Christianity also brought the Latin script to Denmark. And at the end of the High Middle Ages, Runes had more or less been replaced by Latin letters.

Danish orthography is conservative, using most of the conventions established in the 16th century. The spoken language however has changed a lot since then, creating a gap between the spoken and written languages. Since 1955, Dansk Sprognævn has been the official language council in Denmark.

The modern Danish alphabet is similar to the English one, with three additional letters: ⟨ æ ⟩, ⟨ ø ⟩, and ⟨ å ⟩, which come at the end of the alphabet, in that order. The letters ⟨ c ⟩, ⟨ q ⟩, ⟨ w ⟩, ⟨ x ⟩ and ⟨ z ⟩ are only used in loan words. A spelling reform in 1948 introduced the letter ⟨ å ⟩, already in use in Norwegian and Swedish, into the Danish alphabet to replace the digraph ⟨ aa ⟩. The old usage continues to occur in some personal and geographical names; for example, the name of the city of Aalborg is spelled with ⟨ Aa ⟩ following a decision by the City Council in the 1970s and Aarhus decided to go back to ⟨ Aa ⟩ in 2011. When representing the same sound ⟨ å ⟩, ⟨ aa ⟩ is treated like ⟨ å ⟩ in alphabetical sorting, though it appears to be two letters. When the letters are not available due to technical limitations, they are often replaced by ⟨ ae ⟩ (for ⟨ æ ⟩), ⟨ oe ⟩ or ⟨ o ⟩ (for ⟨ ø ⟩), and ⟨ aa ⟩ (for ⟨ å ⟩), respectively.

The same spelling reform changed the spelling of a few common words, such as the past tense vilde (would), kunde (could) and skulde (should), to their current forms of ville, kunne and skulle (making them identical to the infinitives in writing, as they are in speech). Modern Danish and Norwegian use the same alphabet, though spelling differs slightly, particularly with the phonetic spelling of loanwords; for example the spelling of station and garage in Danish remains identical to other languages, whereas in Norwegian, they are transliterated as stasjon and garasje.