Aa was usually treated as a single letter, spoken like the present Å when spelling out names or words. Most people felt no need for the new letter, although the letter group Aa had already been pronounced like Å for centuries all over Scandinavia. In an attempt to modernize the orthography, linguists tried to introduce the Å to Danish and Norwegian writing in the 19th century. It was first used in print in the Gustav Vasa Bible that was published in 1541 and replaced Aa in the 16th century. A minuscule O was placed on top of an A to create a new letter.
This construction was also applied to construct a new grapheme where an "aa" previously had been used. They later evolved into the modern letters Ä and Ö, where the E was simplified into the two dots now referred to as umlaut. Instead of using ligatures, a minuscule E was placed above the letters A and O to create new graphemes. In Old Swedish the use of the ligatures Æ and Œ that represented the sounds and respectively were gradually replaced by new letters. Medieval writing often used doubled letters for long vowels, and the vowel continued to be written Aa. This was a long /aː/ sound, but over time, the vowel developed to an sound. Historically, the letter Å derives from the Old Norse vowel á. In historical linguistics, the Å-sound originally had the same origin as the long /aː/ sound in German Aal and Haar ( Scandinavian ål, hår, English eel, hair). In Danish and Norwegian, the long version is pronounced IPA /ɔː/.
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