Where do æ, ø and å sort in Norwegian?

They sort after z, at the very end of the alphabet, in the order æ then ø then å. So a name beginning with Å sorts last, after every word starting with a–z, æ or ø.

How is this different from German sorting?

German typically treats ä, ö and ü as their base vowels a, o and u (or as ae, oe, ue) for sorting. Norwegian does the opposite, treating æ, ø and å as separate letters placed after z, so the two languages order the same characters very differently.

Does it use proper locale collation?

Yes. The tool uses the browser's Norwegian Intl.Collator where available, which knows the correct ordering, and falls back to a manual weight table that places æ, ø and å at positions 27, 28 and 29.

Is the sort case-sensitive?

No. It compares case-insensitively so Åse and åse sort to the same place. Blank lines are removed and surrounding whitespace is trimmed before sorting.

Norwegian Alphabetical Sort

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Norwegian alphabetical order is not the same as a plain Unicode or English sort. The three extra letters æ, ø and å belong at the end of the alphabet, after z, and getting that wrong scrambles name lists and indexes.

How it works

The tool sorts your lines using Norwegian collation:

Where the browser supports it, an Intl.Collator with the Norwegian locale provides the correct ordering directly.
As a fallback, a manual weight table assigns a–z the weights 1–26 and gives æ, ø and å the weights 27, 28 and 29, so they always follow z.

Comparison is case-insensitive, and blank lines are stripped before sorting.

Example and notes

Given Åse, Anne, Øyvind, Æsa, Bjørn, Zakarias, the Norwegian order is Anne, Bjørn, Zakarias, Æsa, Øyvind, Åse. Notice that Åse lands last and the three special letters keep their fixed æ–ø–å order. This is the standard ordering shared with Danish; Swedish instead ends its alphabet with å, ä, ö.