Introduction to Nynorsk/Alphabet, spelling and pronunciation

Nynorsk uses a variant of the latin alphabet; the same one that both Bokmål and Danish also use. Note, however, that the use of the alphabet varies from language to language; such as when and how often variants of the letters are used, and how phonetic the spelling is.

Alphabet
The alphabet has 29 letters. Below they are listed with their main pronunciation(s); deviations do exist, as is demonstrated by the two following subsections.

Variants of letters
Some of the vowels in the alphabet are occasionally modified with different diacritics, sometimes indicating a special pronunciation.

Letter combinations
The first batch of letter combinations represent unique sounds that no letter in isolation represents. These sounds could in other words be represented by their own letters. For instance, the sound /ʃ/ (represented by sj and skj in Norwegian, sh in English) has its own letter in many alphabets, like the Russian Cyrillic letter ш; a letter which is indeeed transliterated as sj in Norwegian.

The second batch of letter combinations typically represent etymological spellings, the way (or closer to the way) the word was pronounced a long time ago. But not always; for instance the word gje ('give') is pronounced /je/, but its Old Norse origin was spelled gefa (and pronounced /geva/?); lacking j completely.