| Danish Braille Norwegian Braille Swedish Braille Finnish Braille Greenlandic Braille | |
|---|---|
| Script type | alphabet |
Print basis | Dano-Norwegian alphabet Swedish alphabet |
| Languages | Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Greenlandic |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Braille
|
Scandinavian Braille is a braille alphabet used, with differences in orthography and punctuation, for the languages of the mainland Nordic countries: Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish. In a generally reduced form it is used for Greenlandic.
Scandinavian Braille is very close to French Braille, with slight modification of some of the accented letters, and optional use of the others to transcribe foreign languages.
The braille letters for the French print vowels â, œ, ä are used for the print vowels å, ö/ø, ä/æ of the Scandinavian alphabets. Each language uses the letters that exists in its inkprint alphabet. Thus, in numerical order, the letters are:
Greenlandic Braille uses a subset of these letters, a e f g i j k l m n o p q r s t u v, though the rest of the Scandinavian alphabet is available when needed.
For foreign accented letters, French Braille assignments are used.
Digits are the first ten letters of the alphabet, and numbers are marked by ⠼, as in English Braille.
Punctuation differs slightly between each country, but this is unlikely to impede understanding.
| , | . | ' | ? | ! | ; | : | * | - | — | / | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finnish |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | |  |
| Swedish/ Norwegian |  | ||||||||||
| Danish/ Greenlandic |  |
The ellipsis ⟨...⟩ is thus ⠄⠄⠄.
Finnish ⠲ ! is not a copy error. It is the reverse of the ⠖ found in all other Nordic countries, though the latter is the + sign in Finnish mathematical notation just as it is in those other countries. Finnish punctuation is used for Swedish text in Finland.
In Swedish Braille, there is also ⠸ for the pipe, |, and ⠿ for the bullet, •.
| “ ... ” | ‘ ... ’ | ( ... ) | [ ... ] | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Finnish/ Swedish |  ... | ... |  ...  |  ...  |
| Norwegian/Faroese | ... | (?) | ||
| Danish/ Greenlandic |  ... | ... |
At least in Norwegian Braille, the braces { ... } are ⠠⠷...⠠⠾.
Given the poor coverage, it is not clear how compatible formatting is between countries. (See Estonian Braille for formatting in an orthography with similar punctuation to Finnish and Swedish.)
| (digit) | (caps) | (all caps) | (italics) | (bold) | |
| Finnish/ Swedish |  |  | | |  |
| Norwegian | (?) | ... | ... | ||
| Danish/ Greenlandic | |  | | (?) |
In Swedish Braille, ⠠⠠ is used to capitalize an entire word, and ⠠⠠⠠ to capitalize several words. The sequences ⠠⠤ and ⠨⠨ are likewise used to italicize and bold several words. The end of any of these is marked with ⠱, for example ⠠⠠⠠ ... ⠱ for caps, ⠠⠤ ... ⠱ for italics, and ⠨⠨ ... ⠱ for bold.
Also in Swedish (and perhaps the others), the auxiliary parentheses ⠘⠦ ... ⠘⠴ are used to add comments that appear only in the braille text, such as a description of a picture in the print text being transcribed.
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek διακριτικός, from διακρίνω. The word diacritic is a noun, though it is sometimes used in an attributive sense, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritics, such as the acute ( ◌́ ) and grave ( ◌̀ ), are often called accents. Diacritics may appear above or below a letter or in some other position such as within the letter or between two letters.
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlements and chronologically coincides with the Viking Age, the Christianization of Scandinavia and the consolidation of Scandinavian kingdoms from about the 8th to the 15th centuries.
Swedish is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, the fourth most spoken Germanic language and the first among any other of its type in the Nordic countries overall.
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish scholars and people.
Ø is a letter used in the Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, and Southern Sámi languages. It is mostly used as to represent the mid front rounded vowels, such as and, except for Southern Sámi where it is used as an diphthong.
The letter Å represents various sounds in several languages. It is a separate letter in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, North Frisian, Low Saxon, Transylvanian Saxon, Walloon, Chamorro, Lule Sami, Pite Sami, Skolt Sami, Southern Sami, Ume Sami, Pamirian languages, and Greenlandic alphabets. Additionally, it is part of the alphabets used for some Alemannic and Austro-Bavarian dialects of German.
The Danish and Norwegian alphabets, together called the Dano-Norwegian alphabet, is the set of symbols, forming a variant of the Latin alphabet, used for writing the Danish and Norwegian languages. It has consisted of the following 29 letters since 1917 (Norwegian) and 1948 (Danish):
Finnish orthography is based on the Latin script, and uses an alphabet derived from the Swedish alphabet, officially comprising twenty-nine letters but also including two additional letters found in some loanwords. The Finnish orthography strives to represent all morphemes phonologically and, roughly speaking, the sound value of each letter tends to correspond with its value in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) – although some discrepancies do exist.
Faroese orthography is the method employed to write the Faroese language, using a 29-letter Latin alphabet.
The history of the Icelandic language began in the 9th century when the settlement of Iceland, mostly by Norwegians, brought a dialect of Old Norse to the island.
Norwegian orthography is the method of writing the Norwegian language, of which there are two written standards: Bokmål and Nynorsk. While Bokmål has for the most part derived its forms from the written Danish language and Danish-Norwegian speech, Nynorsk gets its word forms from Aasen's reconstructed "base dialect", which is intended to represent the distinctive dialectal forms. Both standards use a 29-letter variant of the Latin alphabet and the same orthographic principles.
The umlaut is the diacritical mark used to indicate in writing the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels.
Bharati braille, or Bharatiya Braille, is a largely unified braille script for writing the languages of India. When India gained independence, eleven braille scripts were in use, in different parts of the country and for different languages. By 1951, a single national standard had been settled on, Bharati braille, which has since been adopted by Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh. There are slight differences in the orthographies for Nepali in India and Nepal, and for Tamil in India and Sri Lanka. There are significant differences in Bengali Braille between India and Bangladesh, with several letters differing. Pakistan has not adopted Bharati braille, so the Urdu Braille of Pakistan is an entirely different alphabet than the Urdu Braille of India, with their commonalities largely due to their common inheritance from English or International Braille. Sinhala Braille largely conforms to other Bharati, but differs significantly toward the end of the alphabet, and is covered in its own article.
The Esperanto language has a dedicated braille alphabet. One Esperanto braille magazine, Esperanta Ligilo, has been published since 1904, and another, Aŭroro, since 1920.
Danish orthography is the system and norms used for writing the Danish language, including spelling and punctuation.
French Braille is the original braille alphabet, and the basis of all others. The alphabetic order of French has become the basis of the international braille convention, used by most braille alphabets around the world. However, only the 25 basic letters of the French alphabet plus w have become internationalized; the additional letters are largely restricted to French Braille and the alphabets of some neighboring European countries.
Portuguese Braille is the braille alphabet of the Portuguese language, both in Portugal and in Brazil. It is very close to French Braille, with slight modification of the accented letters and some differences in punctuation.
IPA Braille is the modern standard Braille encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), as recognized by the International Council on English Braille.
Faroese Braille is the braille alphabet of the Faroese language. It has the same basic letter assignments as the Scandinavian Braille and is quite similar to the Icelandic Braille.
