Finnish Diacritic Remover

Maps Finnish ä→a, ö→o (and å, ü in loan words) to plain ASCII

Convert Finnish text to plain ASCII by mapping ä→a, ö→o, å→a, and ü→u for URLs, filenames, and legacy systems. Important: in Finnish ä and ö are distinct letters, not accents, so this is for ASCII compatibility only, never for respelling words. Runs in your browser.

Which letters does it convert?

It maps the Finnish special letters to ASCII: a-umlaut becomes a, o-umlaut becomes o, a-ring becomes a, and u-umlaut becomes u. A few foreign letters seen in names (e-acute, s-caron, z-caron) are also folded so mixed text comes out clean ASCII.

This tool converts Finnish text to plain ASCII for systems that cannot handle the letters ä, ö, å, or ü. It is a compatibility helper, not a spelling tool.

How it works

The remover walks through your text character by character and replaces each special letter with its closest ASCII equivalent, leaving everything else unchanged:

ä → a   Ä → A
ö → o   Ö → O
å → a   Å → A
ü → u   Ü → U

Case is preserved and the rest of the text — spaces, digits, punctuation — passes through untouched. A few non-Finnish letters that often appear in imported names (é, š, ž) are also folded so the output is reliably ASCII.

Important note on Finnish letters

In Finnish, ä and ö are full letters of the alphabet with their own pronunciation, not accented variants of a and o. Removing them genuinely changes words: säde (ray) versus sade (rain), or tällä versus talla. So use ASCII output only where the system demands it — URL slugs, filenames, legacy databases — and always keep the original spelling for anything a person reads.

Tips and notes

å (the “Swedish o”) appears in Finnish almost only in Swedish loan words and place names such as Åland; folding it to a is fine for ASCII keys. To understand why these letters sort at the very end of the Finnish alphabet, see the Finnish alphabetical-sort tool.