Are å, ä and ö really separate letters?

Yes. In Swedish they are full letters of the alphabet, sorted after z, not accented forms of a and o. That is why removing them is a deliberate, lossy transliteration rather than a cosmetic clean-up.

Which replacements does the tool use?

It maps å→a, ä→a and ö→o, preserving case so Åre becomes Are and Göteborg becomes Goteborg. These are the standard ASCII substitutions used for Swedish in URLs and identifiers.

Can this change a word's meaning?

Yes, and that is the main caution. Swedish minimal pairs such as mätt (full) versus matt (dull), or hår (hair) versus har (has), collapse to the same spelling once the diacritics are removed.

When should I remove these letters?

Only when a target system cannot store Unicode, such as some legacy databases, ASCII-only filenames, or simplified URL slugs. For human-readable Swedish text you should keep the original letters.

Is my text uploaded anywhere?

No. The character map is bundled into the page and all replacement happens in your browser, so your text never leaves your device.

Swedish Diacritic Remover

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The Swedish Diacritic Remover converts the three extra Swedish letters — å, ä, ö — into plain ASCII for systems that cannot store them. It maps å→a, ä→a and ö→o while preserving case, and counts how many letters it changed.

How it works

The tool walks through your text one character at a time and substitutes any Swedish letter it recognises:

å → a    Å → A
ä → a    Ä → A
ö → o    Ö → O

Every other character — including spaces, punctuation, and letters from other languages — is left untouched. Because å, ä and ö are precomposed letters rather than a base letter plus a combining accent, the tool uses a direct lookup table rather than Unicode decomposition, which would not produce the single-letter Swedish convention.

Why this is lossy

In Swedish these are distinct letters of a 29-letter alphabet, not accents you can safely drop. Removing them can merge words that mean different things:

mätt (full) → matt (dull, matte)
hår (hair) → har (has)
över (over) → over (no longer Swedish)

When to use it

Reach for this only when the destination cannot accept Unicode — ASCII-only filenames, simplified URL slugs, or older systems with single-byte encodings. For anything a person will read in Swedish, keep the original letters.