The Swedish Dialect Alphabet (Swedish: Landsmålsalfabetet) is a phonetic alphabet created in 1878 by Johan August Lundell and used for the narrow transcription of Swedish dialects. The initial version of the alphabet consisted of 89 letters, 42 of which came from the phonetic alphabet proposed by Carl Jakob Sundevall. It has since grown to over 200 letters. The alphabet supplemented Latin letters with symbols adapted from a range of alphabets, including modified forms of þ and ð from Germanic alphabets, γ and φ from the Greek alphabet and ы from the Cyrillic alphabet, and extended with systematic decorations. There are also a number of diacritics representing prosodic features.
The alphabet has been used extensively for the description of Swedish dialects in both Sweden and Finland. It was also the source of many of the symbols used by the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren in his reconstruction of Middle Chinese.
_q.jpg)