How to type Swedish, Norwegian and Danish letters on iPhone
Å, ä, ö, æ and ø are already reachable on the English keyboard by holding a or o — the same press-and-hold gesture as é or ñ. What adding the Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål or Danish keyboard actually changes: three dedicated keys, and a dictionary that stops fighting you.
Swedish spells it å, ä, ö. Norwegian and Danish spell the same idea æ, ø, å. None of the five sits on the English iPhone keyboard, and unlike some other languages covered on this site, that is not because iOS forgot them — every one of the five is already reachable from the default English keyboard. The real question is whether reaching for them that way is the right long-term habit, and it depends on how often you are typing in one of these three languages.
They are letters, not accented vowels
In French or German, é and ü are still versions of e and u — drop the mark in a hurry and a reader still recognises the word underneath. Å, ä and ö are not treated that way in Swedish, and æ, ø and å are not treated that way in Norwegian or Danish: each is its own letter, alphabetised after z rather than sorted next to a or o. A Swedish phone book or a Swedish dictionary ends its alphabet …x, y, z, å, ä, ö. A Norwegian or Danish one ends …x, y, z, æ, ø, å. That placement is not a quirk of typography. It is why swapping ö for o, or ø for o, does not read as a missing accent — it reads as a different letter, sometimes a different word.
All five are already one hold away
The standard English keyboard opens a small row of variants when you press and hold certain letters, the same gesture behind é or ñ. Hold a and the row includes å and ä. Hold o and the row includes ö and ø. That is the full set — nothing here is missing the way ą or ł are missing from the English keyboard for Polish. For a name or a single word inside an English message, the hold gesture is genuinely enough, no extra keyboard required.
Add the Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål or Danish keyboard for a key of its own
- Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards.
- Tap “Add New Keyboard…” and choose Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål or Danish from the list.
- The keyboard joins your list. Switch to it with a tap or a hold on the globe key 🌐, the same gesture used to move between any two keyboards on iPhone.
Rather than borrowing the general Western European accent row, each of these keyboards gives its extra letters a physical key: å sits at the right end of the top letter row, past P, and the other two — ä and ö on the Swedish keyboard, æ and ø on the Norwegian Bokmål and Danish ones — sit at the right end of the middle row, past L. They are not hidden behind anything once you are on the right keyboard; they are keys like any other.
Why bother, if the hold gesture already reaches all five
Speed is the smaller reason — a dedicated key is faster than holding and sliding every single time, and that gap adds up across a whole message written in one of these languages rather than a single borrowed word. The bigger reason is the dictionary sitting behind the keys. Each iOS keyboard carries its own autocorrect and word-prediction store, and switching keyboards switches the whole thing with it. Type Swedish on the English keyboard, even reaching ä and ö with the hold gesture correctly every time, and autocorrect is still working from an English word list — it will flag or “fix” perfectly ordinary Swedish words the entire way through, because none of them are in the dictionary it is checking against. Switching to the actual Swedish, Norwegian Bokmål or Danish keyboard hands prediction and correction the right dictionary along with the layout, which matters far more once you are writing more than one word.
Where Kibo fits
Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are three of the 30 typing languages built into Kibo, inside a single keyboard rather than three separate iOS keyboards to add and switch between. Turn on the ones you use and a tap or hold on the globe key cycles through just those, with a brief on-screen label naming the language you have landed on. Typing in any of them, like any of Kibo’s languages, needs no Full Access — that switch is read only by the Copy word, Copy line and Paste buttons on the keyboard toolbar. Kibo is free to download.
Frequently asked questions
Are å, ä and ö really separate letters, not just vowels with an accent?
Yes. In Swedish they are alphabetised after z, not next to a or o, and Norwegian and Danish do the same with æ, ø and å. That is different from a French é or German ü, which stay filed next to their plain letter.
Can I already type å, ä, ö, æ and ø without adding a keyboard?
Yes. On the standard English iPhone keyboard, holding a opens å and ä, and holding o opens ö and ø, the same press-and-hold gesture used for é or ñ. All five are covered, which is not true of every language’s extra letters.
Is the Swedish keyboard the same layout as Norwegian Bokmål or Danish?
Nearly identical. All three are the same QWERTY-based Nordic layout with å in the same spot at the end of the top row, but Swedish gives the middle-row spot to ä and ö while Norwegian Bokmål and Danish give it to æ and ø instead — and each carries its own separate autocorrect dictionary regardless of how similar the layout looks.
Try it on your own keyboard
Kibo is a free custom keyboard for iPhone with real mechanical key sounds, a wardrobe of themes and RGB backlight effects. No account, no ads, and it works with Full Access left off.