Norwegian orthography
Norwegian orthography is the method of writing the Norwegian language, of which there are two written standards: Bokmål and Nynorsk. While Bokmål has for the most part derived its forms from the written Danish language or the common Danish-Norwegian speech, Nynorsk gets its orthographical standards from Aasen's reconstructed "base dialect", which are intended to represent the distinctive dialectical forms. Both standards use a 29-letter variant of Latin alphabet.
Alphabet
The Norwegian alphabet is based upon the Latin alphabet and is identical to the Danish alphabet. Since 1917 it has consisted of the following 29 letters.
The letters c, q, w, x and z are not used in the spelling of indigenous Norwegian words. They are rarely used; loanwords routinely have their orthography adapted to the native sound system.
Diacritics
Norwegian (especially the Nynorsk variant) also uses several letters with diacritic signs: é, è, ê, ó, ò, â, and ô. The diacritic signs are not compulsory, but can be added to clarify the meaning of words (homonyms) which otherwise would be identical. One example is ein gut ("a boy") versus éin gut ("one boy"). Loanwords may be spelled with other diacritics, most notably ü, á, à and é, following the conventions of the original language. The Norwegian vowels æ, ø and å never take diacritics.