How does Italian sorting treat accented vowels?

Italian collation folds à, è, é, ì, ò, ù to their base vowels at the primary level, so città sorts as if spelled citta. Accents only break ties at the secondary level between otherwise identical words.

Where do j, k, w, x, y sort in Italian?

These five letters are not native to the Italian alphabet and appear only in loanwords. In CLDR Italian ordering they sit in their normal Latin positions, but culturally they are treated as foreign additions after the core 21 letters.

Why use locale collation instead of code-point sorting?

Raw code-point sorting puts every accented vowel after z and separates upper from lower case, which scatters an Italian list incorrectly. The Italian collator interleaves à with a and folds case the way a reader expects.

Does Italian have a special digraph order?

Unlike some languages, modern Italian does not treat digraphs such as gn or sc as single sort units. Each letter sorts independently, so the standard Latin collation with vowel folding gives correct results.

Italian Alphabetical Sort

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Sorting Italian text correctly requires folding accented vowels such as à, è, and ù to their base letters and recognising that j, k, w, x, and y are foreign imports rather than native letters. This tool uses the browser’s Italian locale collator.

How it works

The Unicode Collation Algorithm compares at multiple levels:

Primary   – base letter only; à, è, é, ì, ò, ù fold to a, e, i, o, u
Secondary – diacritics break ties (e < è)
Tertiary  – case breaks remaining ties (e < E)

The native Italian alphabet has 21 letters; j, k, w, x, y appear only in loanwords. The it locale supplies the correct weights, and choosing sensitivity: "base" ignores accents while "accent" keeps them as a tie-breaker.

Example and notes

A list containing città, citta, and casa sorts with the two città spellings adjacent and ordered by their accent weight, while casa comes first. Use the accent-insensitive base mode to build search keys, and the accent-sensitive mode for dictionary-style display order.