Last week, I continued my series on the three special Swedish letters, å, ä and ö. Now I’m here to explain how the letter å even came to be at all.

As I explained last time, the letter å in writing came to be like so: first as a double-a (aa), then as an a with another, smaller a written over it, and finally a simplified å. But why exactly was there a double-a at all?

The double-a was used to indicate a long a-sound, which eventually, over time, began to sound much like the long o-sound of that time (similar to today’s å); in other words, the long a became orally more closed. And while the long a became more and more like the long o, the long o became itself more closed, becoming closer and closer to the long u-sound of that time. And with that, the long u-sound became even more closed, evolving into a new sound: the Swedish long u we know and love today.

In a more graphical form, the vowel shift looked like this:

And that’s why today’s Swedish vowels are so different from the vowels of many other European languages although they are spellt the same.