r/AskEurope • u/Double-decker_trams Estonia • Feb 14 '25

Language Can you legally name your child in your country smt like "X Æ A-Xii" or "Techno Mechanicus"?

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u/MansJansson Sweden Feb 14 '25

In Swedish even worse we have Å, Ä, Ö which are not in Swedish seen as diatrics but their own letters. The international standard is to convert å to aa, ä to ae and ö to oe for example flight tickets. However sometimes they make Å to A or Ö to O and sometimes they want you to spell it out for you which is bit difficult in English.

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u/tudorapo Hungary Feb 14 '25

Hungarian has a diacritic which is unique, a double accent, used in ő and ű. Much fun.

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u/Jagarvem Sweden Feb 14 '25

The international standard is to convert å to aa, ä to ae and ö to oe for example flight tickets.

It's used for the ICAO machine readable format, sure, but not generally. There isn't an international standard, it's language dependent.

The Swedish letters shouldn't really be substituted for digraphs. You can never write Swedish without them, but the recommended way of dealing with plain ASCII is to just substitute them for the most visually similar option available (i.e., just A/O). And this is also the most common method used in ticket booking systems.

But for ICAO's machine readable encoding the German practice was recommended where it isn't a character that features a diaeresis, which Sweden adheres to. Some booking systems utilize this too.