Icelandic orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet which has 32 letters. Compared with the 26 letters of English, the Icelandic alphabet lacks C, Q, W and Z, but additionally has Ð, Þ, Æ and Ö. Six letters have forms with acute accents to produce Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú and Ý. The letters Eth (, capital ), transliterated as, and Thorn (, capital ), transliterated as , are widely used in the Icelandic language. Eth is also used in Faroese and Elfdalian, while thorn was used in many historical languages such as Old English. The letters (capital ) and (capital ) are considered as completely separate letters in Icelandic, and are collated as such, even though they originated as a ligature and a diacritical version respectively. Icelandic words never start with, which means its capital occurs only when words are spelled in all capitals. The alphabet is as follows: The above table has 33 letters, including the letter Z which is obsolete but may be found in older texts, e.g. verzlun became verslun. The names of the letters are grammatically neuter (except the now obsolete which is grammatically feminine). The letters, , , , , , , , , , , , and are considered vowels, and the remainder are consonants. (sé, ), (kú, ) and (tvöfalt vaff, ) are only used in Icelandic in words of foreign origin and some proper names that are also of foreign origin. Otherwise,, , and are replaced by , , and respectively. (In fact, etymologically corresponds to Latin and English in words inherited from Proto-Indo-European: Icelandic hvað, Latin quod, English what.) (seta, ) was used until 1973, when it was abolished, as it was only an etymological detail. It originally represented an affricate, which arose from the combinations +, +, +; however, in modern Icelandic it came to be pronounced , and since it was a letter that was not commonly used, it was decided in 1973 to replace all instances of with. However, one of the most important newspapers in Iceland, Morgunblaðið, still uses it sometimes (although very rarely), a hot-dog chain, Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, and a secondary school, Verzlunarskóli Íslands have it in their names. It is also found in some proper names (e.g. Zakarías, Haralz, Zoëga), and loanwords such as pizza (also written pítsa). Older people who were educated before the abolition of the sometimes also use it. While, , , and are found on the Icelandic keyboard, they are rarely used in Icelandic; they are used in some proper names of Icelanders, mainly family names (family names are the exception in Iceland). is used on road signs (to indicate city centre) according to European regulation, and cm is used for the centimetre according to the international SI system (while it may be written out as sentimetri). Many believe these letters should be included in the alphabet, as its purpose is a tool to collate (sort into the correct order), and practically that is done, i.e. computers treat the alphabet as a superset of the English alphabet. The alphabet as taught in schools up to about 1980 has these 36 letters (and computers still order this way): a, á, b, c, d, ð, e, é, f, g, h, i, í, j, k, l, m, n, o, ó, p, q, r, s, t, u, ú, v, w, x, y, ý, z, þ, æ, ö.

History

The modern Icelandic alphabet developed from a standard established in the 19th century (primarily by Danish linguist Rasmus Rask). It is ultimately based heavily on an orthographic standard created in the early 12th century by a document referred to as The First Grammatical Treatise, author unknown. The standard was intended for the common North Germanic language Old Norse. It did not have much influence, however, at the time. The most defining characteristics of the alphabet were established in the old treatise: The later Rasmus Rask standard was basically a re-enactment of the old treatise, with some changes to fit concurrent North Germanic conventions, such as the exclusive use of rather than. Various old features, like, had actually not seen much use in the later centuries, so Rask's standard constituted a major change in practice. Later 20th century changes are most notably the adoption of, which had previously been written as (reflecting the modern pronunciation), and the replacement of with in 1973.

Spelling-to-sound correspondence

This section lists Icelandic letters and letter combinations and their phonemic representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Vowels

Icelandic vowels may be either long or short, but this distinction is only relevant in stressed syllables: unstressed vowels are neutral in quantitative aspect. The vowel length is determined by the consonants that follow the vowel: if there is only one consonant before another vowel or at the end of a word (i.e., CV****CV or CVC# syllable structure), the vowel is long; if there are more than one (CVCCV), counting geminates and pre-aspirated stops as CC, the vowel is short. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule:

Consonants

Code pages

The alphabet is included in Unicode. Historically, ISO 8859-1 was the most used code page, followed by Windows-1252, which extends the Icelandic alphabet with e.g. the euro sign. ISO 8859-15 also extends the alphabet, but with the euro in a different place.