How are the three letters mapped?

æ becomes ae, ø becomes o, and å becomes a, with the matching uppercase forms (Æ→Ae, Ø→O, Å→A). These are the common modern transliterations used when Danish text must fit ASCII-only systems.

Why not just strip the accents with Unicode normalisation?

Because æ, ø and å are not accented vowels — they are separate letters. æ in particular is a ligature that maps to two ASCII letters (ae), which a naive accent-stripping pass would not produce. A direct character map gives the correct Danish transliteration.

Is the conversion reversible?

No, it is lossy. Mapping changes meaning: hår (hair) becomes har (has), and læse (read) becomes laese. Keep the original text and use the ASCII version only where the special letters cannot be stored.

What about the old aa spelling of å?

Historically å was written aa, and you still see it in names like Aalborg. This tool uses the modern å→a convention; if you need å→aa for a specific name, adjust that word by hand.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The transliteration runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to a server.

Danish Diacritic Remover

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The Danish Diacritic Remover converts the three extra Danish letters — æ, ø, and å — into plain ASCII, so Danish text can pass through systems that only accept a–z, such as legacy databases, URL slugs, email addresses, or file names.

How it works

The tool applies a direct character map rather than Unicode accent-stripping:

æ → ae    Æ → Ae
ø → o     Ø → O
å → a     Å → A

Every other character is left untouched, and a counter shows how many letters were mapped. A character map is the right approach here because æ is a ligature that expands to two ASCII letters (ae) — something a generic “remove accents” pass, which only decomposes precomposed accented characters, would get wrong.

Why the conversion is lossy

æ, ø, and å are separate letters in the Danish alphabet, not accented variants of a, o, or other vowels. Removing them can change a word’s meaning:

hår (hair) → har (has)
læse (read) → laese
øl (beer) → ol

Always keep the original Danish text and use the ASCII version only where the real letters cannot be stored. The same three letters are shared with Norwegian, so the same mapping applies to Norwegian text.

Notes

The historical spelling of å was aa (as in Aalborg), which this tool does not produce — it uses the modern å→a convention. For specific place names that still use aa, adjust those words by hand.