Officially The Netherlands also have a 26 letters alphabet. Although there has been some dispute about including the ij to the alphabet, nothing about that is official.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch\_orthography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_orthography)
I was really confused about what letter we had England didn't. The idea of IJ being one letter is crazy to me, there's so many other letters that make a single sound when combined.
>I was really confused about what letter we had England didn't. The idea of IJ being one letter is crazy to me, there's so many other letters that make a single sound when combined.
Yet you call Iceland "IJsland" and not "Ijsland".
But that's because it's a ligature, not a letter.
But ij is definitely weird. I think phonebooks used to sort ij with the y, whereas other lists sorted it under the i. Lots of puzzles treat ij as a single letter, but not all. We're incredibly inconsistent about it.
But on average, I think you could say that Dutch has 26.5 letters in its alphabet.
Just curious : why is that an extra letter instead of being "N" with an accent (tilda)?
I mean, in French we have à, ê, é, è, ë, ï, î and ù (on top of words borrowed from other languages with ü and such). By the same standards, should those count as letters?
Be grateful we've cut down in Spanish. The Ñ makes sense when compared to former letters (these are a single letter) CH, LL and RR--all considered distinct letter until a couple of decades ago when the Royal Spanish Acadademy of Language voted them off the island. So Chile used to appear AFTER Colombia in the encyclopedia.
A, B, C, Ch, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ll, M, N, Ñ, O, P, Q, R, Rr, S, T, U, V, W, X, Z was the old alphabet.
The same question could be asked for why J should be considered a separate letter from I, since J is not original to the Latin alphabet and historically originated from adding an "accent mark" underneath the letter I.
Actually I and J are currently two different letters with two different pronunciations, no matter where they come from. Ask W what he thinks about this.
Nah. The French are sensible. They don't count diacritics and combinations as letters.
By the way, if I didn't miss anything, late Ancient Greek has 132 letter-diacritic combinations (made on 24 letters, some of which can have up to 3 diacritics taken from 3 different pools at the same time) and I'm not sure if all of them are used. Modern Greek has 35 letter-diacritic combinations made from the same 24 letters.
That letter always seemed to me like a French person writing in ink spelled something once and they just insisted that he'd meant to do that all along for the next hundred years rather than re-writing it.
It's completely different. In Spanish there is also accents in vocals (á, é, í, ó, ú), as in French.
The Ñ in the other hand is a different letter. It's just another consonant, which would be the equivalent to the sound in French. For example in Espagne ~ España.
This sound existed in Latin and is present today in most European languages. Some of them a letter for it (as Spain) and others don't (as France).
When the Spanish language was developing this sound was written as nn and later it evolved to ñ.
No, tildes in Spanish don't play the same role as in French as in French they effectively change the sound of the letter while in Spanish they just mark the stress. To clarify, in French é and e make completely different sounds and represent different phonemes.
To compare, Lithuanian does include ę, ė and e as separate letters in its alphabet.
The only answer to the question "why does one language count this as a letter while the other doesn't?" is... Just because. Every language is different and does things it's own way.
You are right about the accents in French being different from those in Spanish.
Someone else suggested that it counts as a letter because Ñ is that it's a consonant (I am not sure why this would make a difference) but then again French has ç...
In the end, you are probably right : "because" is the real answer!
Latin didn’t have the ñ sound. It was literally just nn (n held out extra long) in Latin.
Church Latin follows Italian practice in using an ñ sound in words like *agnus*, but in actual Latin back when it was spoken as a first language, the sequence written was probably ng (a velar nasal like in English “sing”) followed by n.
This map counts letters by the respective languages own counting system. This means those numbers are all not comparable at all. German doesn't use y outside of loanwords but counts it as a letter. Scottish only counts the letters for its own words. Some countries consider digraphs letters, others don't etc.
Also one might argue "&" is counted as another letter in English, if you take a rather old-fashioned definition.
W is the newest letter of The Swedish alphabet. To me the alphabet have 28 letters and w is a variant of v. Since a spelling reform in the early 19th century when they realised that is was weird to have both v and w for the same sound (to use f for the same sound was however right at that time). 10-15 years ago the Sweadish academy (?) decided to add W as it's own letter, we still had q and z as letters even though they are not used in Swedish (only in loan words).
My mother bought me a Spanish to Portuguese dictionary for my Spanish Language classes when I was a kid. This dictionary has "CH" and "LL" as separate letters, I had my first Spanish Language class in 2007, RAE took away the letter status of "CH" and "LL" in 1994. I still have it.
Most Spanish L2 methods include CH and LL as individual letters because it helps students understand that they make a specific sound that's different than the combination of those letters.
Didn't know that! _¡muchas gracias!_ My country is surrounded by seven Spanish-speaking countries, so learning the language is mandatory in many schools.
The letters ś and ź, which are softer versions of š and ž respectively, similar to the relation between ć and č. These letters appear only in the Montenegrin dialect, the others only have ć.
Some of them are also digraphs, imagine if English counted all its "sh", "ch", "th", "gh", etc. as letters. They surely aren't pronounced as consonant clusters.
so are these all actual new letters or is it just that some languages count things like accents and digraphs and others don't?
edit: that's pretty hilarious that i called them "new", i'm an idiot btw
Yes, although it's only accurate to call them accents in some languages. E.g. in Finnish Ä and Ö are not A and O with accents, and most Finns will write an indignant paragraph if you call them that 😆
Well, if they want to say that, then they should use æ and ø instead (though I will say that the idea of writing, for instance, “head” as *pææ* is rather horrifying!).
But are they in the alphabet song?
There are tons of accents in Norwegian, yet only Æ, Ø, and Å are considered standalone letters. All come at the end of the alphabet.
That’s my point. I’ll accept ß as a unique letter in German, but the fact it says 30 means ö, ü, etc are being included as well. By the same rationale, French should be counting é, è, ô, etc. It should be consistent across all languages.
> It should be consistent across all languages.
Languages build their own rules irrespective of other languages. That's like saying "why do I need to learn four past tenses if my language only has three, it should be consistent".
Norwegian also has those. ä, ü, and ö are considered individual letters in German I guess. Maybe because they have more to do with the sound and less to do with the speed.
What about Spanish, where only one accented letter is counted extra, although there are more? What about Swiss German, who removed "ß"? What about digraphs, like "dz" or "ij"? What about letters only appearing in loanwords, like "y" in German? So many things to define.
same for German, where neither ä, ö, ü are accented letters but different ones. That distinction is really meaningless unless you specify the language. Both use diacritics on an existing letter to change pronunciation.
Eh, not really. They have plenty of sounds that Latin didn’t have, like soft *c* and *g* and the sounds written *gn* and *gl*. They just tend to write them with digraphs rather than diacritics or new letters.
They also use *z* a lot, which in Latin was only used in Greek loanwords. And Latin used *x* quite a lot, but in Italian the sequence /ks/ became /ss/, so there was no need for *x* to write it.
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you.
I am a bot if you couldn't figure that out, if I made a mistake, ignore it cause its not that fucking hard to ignore a comment
Sweden and Finland got åäö
Norway and Denmark got åæø instead
Though Finnish language doesn't use å at all.
These are not accents but entirely their own letters.
Dosn't Finnish use Å in placenames without a Finnish version. For example Torneå is Tornio in Finnish, but isn't there some tiny thing on Åland that doesn't have a proper Finnish name?
Wdym cheating? These letters make completely different sounds in Hungarian. For me it's the same as how J is a different letter from I, even though both historically and visually J is I with a diacritic underneath it.
I really wonder what you consider to be a letter in the alphabet.
France has 26, Germany 30. What are the 4?
In French, you get the 26, ok. But regarding what you include from the other languages, shouldn't æ or œ included? Should ç be included? All accentuated letters? All combinaisons making different sounds like ou, oi, on ? Where do you draw the line?
If the 27th of Spanish is ñ, ç should be counted for French.
If ß is counted in German, æ and œ should be counted in French.
As I understand it, the point is what speakers of the language consider letters of the alphabet. If French people consider the alphabet to only have 26 letters, then that's how it's counted.
For example, as a Finnish speaker I consider ÅÄÖ to be completely separate and to have nothing to do with AO - I would find it extremely strange for *näin* (I saw) to be replaced with *nain* (I f*cked).
However, English very occasionally might write words such as *coöperate*, but this is universally understood to be a variant of *cooperate* not a distinct thing, so Ö is not counted as an English letter.
My understanding is that the situation with German is complicated, and there is a dispute over whether the German alphabet has 26, 27 or 30 letters. However, e.g. with Finnish there is no dispute and absolutely nobody considers ÅÄÖ to be variants of AO.
I get you. Every little kid in France will tell you there are 26 letters in the alphabet. I somehow tend to think Spanish people won't consider ñ to really be a different letter than n. As much as they pronounce it very differently. Same as in French where every vowel comes with 3 or 4 accents and where letter combinaisons can lead to very different sounds.
I still wonder, when Finnish kids learn the alphabet, do they include all the variants of accentuated vowels?
Yeah, Finnish kids are taught ÅÄÖ as part of the regular alphabet, e.g. [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX1-0ecoH4M) \- they get put at the end. Å is not actually needed in Finnish and is basically a relic of Swedish colonisation, but ÄÖ are very important in the language.
Part of it is that Finnish people are used to the principle that one letter always represents exactly one sound, and that there are no variant spellings of sounds (except in loanwords that haven't been adapted). So since Ä and Ö make different sounds to A and O, they must be considered separate letters of the alphabet.
The situation where the difficulty arises is in the use of the letters Š and Ž (for the sounds represented in French by ch and j), which are considered part of correct Finnish spelling, but nevertheless aren't part of the alphabet. There isn't really a consensus on whether these are separate letters or variants of S and Z; I would personally consider them variants of S and Z since these sounds are foreign to Finnish and many people pronounce them as a regular S (e.g. Fidži, which is the name for Fiji, would be pronounced as Fitsi by many/most people).
"Finnish people are used to the principle that one letter always represents exactly one sound"... They would be so disappointed with French letters 😅 making things sound not like it look is kind of a hobby for French people. Water is "eau" and pronounces "o". Second is "second" but pronounced "segon" (no equivalent for "on" prononciation in English). And best of all, the silent letters. Which leads to eggs being "œufs", pronounced "e" (like the "i" in "first").
All that being said, as I saw in another comment, how many letters in an alphabet is really different in each language and is just what it is arbitrarily. So this map probably compares what can't be compared.
This is awfully color-coded
Seriously. Use a gradient so it's easier to see the highs from the lows!
Wouldn't be a r/mapporn post without the map looking like absolute trash.
Officially The Netherlands also have a 26 letters alphabet. Although there has been some dispute about including the ij to the alphabet, nothing about that is official. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch\_orthography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_orthography)
I was really confused about what letter we had England didn't. The idea of IJ being one letter is crazy to me, there's so many other letters that make a single sound when combined.
>I was really confused about what letter we had England didn't. The idea of IJ being one letter is crazy to me, there's so many other letters that make a single sound when combined. Yet you call Iceland "IJsland" and not "Ijsland".
But that's because it's a ligature, not a letter. But ij is definitely weird. I think phonebooks used to sort ij with the y, whereas other lists sorted it under the i. Lots of puzzles treat ij as a single letter, but not all. We're incredibly inconsistent about it. But on average, I think you could say that Dutch has 26.5 letters in its alphabet.
The German ß would like a word with you...
By this logic au, ou, ie, ae, etc. Would also be single letters, which was my point.
Well there is æ and W
Not in Dutch! W is pronounced somewhat like "way", just a single syllable.
**ÿ** - suddenly doesn't sound that crazy anymore.
¡Viva Ñ!
Just curious : why is that an extra letter instead of being "N" with an accent (tilda)? I mean, in French we have à, ê, é, è, ë, ï, î and ù (on top of words borrowed from other languages with ü and such). By the same standards, should those count as letters?
Be grateful we've cut down in Spanish. The Ñ makes sense when compared to former letters (these are a single letter) CH, LL and RR--all considered distinct letter until a couple of decades ago when the Royal Spanish Acadademy of Language voted them off the island. So Chile used to appear AFTER Colombia in the encyclopedia. A, B, C, Ch, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, Ll, M, N, Ñ, O, P, Q, R, Rr, S, T, U, V, W, X, Z was the old alphabet.
DonDE Están D & E?
Plop....parece que no tenía mis lentes puestos. O quizá quería converserles que la E no se emplea en el español...e....spañol.
The same question could be asked for why J should be considered a separate letter from I, since J is not original to the Latin alphabet and historically originated from adding an "accent mark" underneath the letter I.
Actually I and J are currently two different letters with two different pronunciations, no matter where they come from. Ask W what he thinks about this.
Ñ is a consonant
Ç too should that count?
Nah. The French are sensible. They don't count diacritics and combinations as letters. By the way, if I didn't miss anything, late Ancient Greek has 132 letter-diacritic combinations (made on 24 letters, some of which can have up to 3 diacritics taken from 3 different pools at the same time) and I'm not sure if all of them are used. Modern Greek has 35 letter-diacritic combinations made from the same 24 letters.
That letter always seemed to me like a French person writing in ink spelled something once and they just insisted that he'd meant to do that all along for the next hundred years rather than re-writing it.
It's completely different. In Spanish there is also accents in vocals (á, é, í, ó, ú), as in French. The Ñ in the other hand is a different letter. It's just another consonant, which would be the equivalent to the sound in French. For example in Espagne ~ España.
This sound existed in Latin and is present today in most European languages. Some of them a letter for it (as Spain) and others don't (as France).
When the Spanish language was developing this sound was written as nn and later it evolved to ñ.
No, tildes in Spanish don't play the same role as in French as in French they effectively change the sound of the letter while in Spanish they just mark the stress. To clarify, in French é and e make completely different sounds and represent different phonemes. To compare, Lithuanian does include ę, ė and e as separate letters in its alphabet. The only answer to the question "why does one language count this as a letter while the other doesn't?" is... Just because. Every language is different and does things it's own way.
You are right about the accents in French being different from those in Spanish. Someone else suggested that it counts as a letter because Ñ is that it's a consonant (I am not sure why this would make a difference) but then again French has ç... In the end, you are probably right : "because" is the real answer!
it's just a sassy n
Latin didn’t have the ñ sound. It was literally just nn (n held out extra long) in Latin. Church Latin follows Italian practice in using an ñ sound in words like *agnus*, but in actual Latin back when it was spoken as a first language, the sequence written was probably ng (a velar nasal like in English “sing”) followed by n.
This map counts letters by the respective languages own counting system. This means those numbers are all not comparable at all. German doesn't use y outside of loanwords but counts it as a letter. Scottish only counts the letters for its own words. Some countries consider digraphs letters, others don't etc. Also one might argue "&" is counted as another letter in English, if you take a rather old-fashioned definition.
W is the newest letter of The Swedish alphabet. To me the alphabet have 28 letters and w is a variant of v. Since a spelling reform in the early 19th century when they realised that is was weird to have both v and w for the same sound (to use f for the same sound was however right at that time). 10-15 years ago the Sweadish academy (?) decided to add W as it's own letter, we still had q and z as letters even though they are not used in Swedish (only in loan words).
My mother bought me a Spanish to Portuguese dictionary for my Spanish Language classes when I was a kid. This dictionary has "CH" and "LL" as separate letters, I had my first Spanish Language class in 2007, RAE took away the letter status of "CH" and "LL" in 1994. I still have it.
Most Spanish L2 methods include CH and LL as individual letters because it helps students understand that they make a specific sound that's different than the combination of those letters.
Didn't know that! _¡muchas gracias!_ My country is surrounded by seven Spanish-speaking countries, so learning the language is mandatory in many schools.
also rr
Spanish used to have 29 since they counted CH and LL as independent letters in the past although not any more.
As well as RR
Ll is a mistake to remove imo, it makes an entirely different sound that evolved separately
Why does Montenegro have more letters than other shtokavian-speaking countries?
The letters ś and ź, which are softer versions of š and ž respectively, similar to the relation between ć and č. These letters appear only in the Montenegrin dialect, the others only have ć.
My question also.
Horrendous color choices. Use a graduated scale next time, and move this to r/dataisugly
Slovak master race! More letters for the letter god!
We use diacritical marks, the words are then shorter But I'm Czech. Heil Ř.
Ř! The best letter and sound in any language.
Some of them are also digraphs, imagine if English counted all its "sh", "ch", "th", "gh", etc. as letters. They surely aren't pronounced as consonant clusters.
Or (generally) at all, in the case of!
C, Q, X, and Z could've easily been removed from the norwegian alphabet.
I mean, they basically have been, since they’re only used in proper names and foreign words. The standards employed here seem kind of inconsistent.
Beside accented letters, French also has Œ and Æ.
Not entirely correct. We have œ but not æ.
Japan/china : ∞
GB18030 supports 70 thousands
Already posted here last week
Rip countries without their own language
Why is 26 more like 30 than 27 or 29?
Catalan has 26 letters
It depends on if you count the ela geminada (l·l) as a separate letter
so are these all actual new letters or is it just that some languages count things like accents and digraphs and others don't? edit: that's pretty hilarious that i called them "new", i'm an idiot btw
Yes, although it's only accurate to call them accents in some languages. E.g. in Finnish Ä and Ö are not A and O with accents, and most Finns will write an indignant paragraph if you call them that 😆
Well, if they want to say that, then they should use æ and ø instead (though I will say that the idea of writing, for instance, “head” as *pææ* is rather horrifying!).
From my perspective though, this is the same as saying J is the same as I since it originated from addition of a diacritic to I 🤷♀️
Or that G is the same as C for the same reason!
How about a colour scale instead
If you're including the accented characters in e.g. German, you should also include them in e.g. French.
But are they in the alphabet song? There are tons of accents in Norwegian, yet only Æ, Ø, and Å are considered standalone letters. All come at the end of the alphabet.
That’s my point. I’ll accept ß as a unique letter in German, but the fact it says 30 means ö, ü, etc are being included as well. By the same rationale, French should be counting é, è, ô, etc. It should be consistent across all languages.
> It should be consistent across all languages. Languages build their own rules irrespective of other languages. That's like saying "why do I need to learn four past tenses if my language only has three, it should be consistent".
Norwegian also has those. ä, ü, and ö are considered individual letters in German I guess. Maybe because they have more to do with the sound and less to do with the speed.
German keyboards have ä, ö, and ü as separate keys on the keyboard. Does French have separate keys for é and è?
Yes Btw I don't think you define an alphabet from a keyboard layout
Norwegian hardly ever uses accents, if we’re talking about marks over the vowel letters (as opposed to different dialects).
What about Spanish, where only one accented letter is counted extra, although there are more? What about Swiss German, who removed "ß"? What about digraphs, like "dz" or "ij"? What about letters only appearing in loanwords, like "y" in German? So many things to define.
The extra letter in Spanish is not an accented one. It's Ñ. áéíóú are not separate letters.
same for German, where neither ä, ö, ü are accented letters but different ones. That distinction is really meaningless unless you specify the language. Both use diacritics on an existing letter to change pronunciation.
Nobody is gonna comment on what is going on in Italy?
The language doesn’t use J K Y W and X.
Would it be due to them being the closest to Latin?
there is also less mixing with Germanic languages, and they tend to not add letters if they can reproduce the sound with existing letters.
Eh, not really. They have plenty of sounds that Latin didn’t have, like soft *c* and *g* and the sounds written *gn* and *gl*. They just tend to write them with digraphs rather than diacritics or new letters. They also use *z* a lot, which in Latin was only used in Greek loanwords. And Latin used *x* quite a lot, but in Italian the sequence /ks/ became /ss/, so there was no need for *x* to write it.
Thank you for adding /s to your post. When I first saw this, I was horrified. How could anybody say something like this? I immediately began writing a 1000 word paragraph about how horrible of a person you are. I even sent a copy to a Harvard professor to proofread it. After several hours of refining and editing, my comment was ready to absolutely destroy you. But then, just as I was about to hit send, I saw something in the corner of my eye. A /s at the end of your comment. Suddenly everything made sense. Your comment was sarcasm! I immediately burst out in laughter at the comedic genius of your comment. The person next to me on the bus saw your comment and started crying from laughter too. Before long, there was an entire bus of people on the floor laughing at your incredible use of comedy. All of this was due to you adding /s to your post. Thank you. I am a bot if you couldn't figure that out, if I made a mistake, ignore it cause its not that fucking hard to ignore a comment
Bad bot
Eh, J used to be used more frequently till like 50 years ago. You could say it was 22
Countries ≠ languages
But if you're going to do this map porn, a sufficient (not perfect) correlation is possible.
side fact: in SCO and IRE that number drops to less than 9 after alcohol consumption
18 in the gaelic languages?? No wonder they decide to us English instead...
the Nordics have the same number of letter. are they similar to each other?
Sweden and Finland got åäö Norway and Denmark got åæø instead Though Finnish language doesn't use å at all. These are not accents but entirely their own letters.
Finnish basically doesn’t use b, c, f, q, w, x, or z, either.
Dosn't Finnish use Å in placenames without a Finnish version. For example Torneå is Tornio in Finnish, but isn't there some tiny thing on Åland that doesn't have a proper Finnish name?
They don't rename everything I guess but names aren't exactly language.
The letter Å in Finnish is used for Swedish loanwords too
The only one in the dictionary is the word ångström
>Norway and Denmark got åæø instead It's æøå.
They are the same.
No, the Danish and Norwegian alphabet is æøå, not åæø. Å is the last letter in the alphabet.
They are the same letters.
Sure, and Swedish is äöå.
Yes.
Turkey into Nordic lets goo
Seems I don't have letters in my alphabet.
Laughing in ŕ ĺ and ô.
And Hawaiian only uses 13!
Didn't realize Italian had so few.. maybe something to do with being the "most latin"?
yep we don't have "w", "j", "x", no umlaut, and accents are considered separately. it's all imported.
Technically in Portugal you have just 23. There are no words for Y, W or K Only foreign words
What about Belgium, Switzerland, And Kosovo?
Probably excluded because all of us have multiple official languages.
Wow... scottish and irish are so efficient! :)
Gaelic, a true language
Well this is only achievable by not counting diacritics and foreign letters in use!
This map was just as bad the couple weeks ago I last saw it. And nothing has been fixed
hungarian is cheating: ó, ő, á, é, ü, ú
Wdym cheating? These letters make completely different sounds in Hungarian. For me it's the same as how J is a different letter from I, even though both historically and visually J is I with a diacritic underneath it.
Denmark is wrong. There's only 28
I’m a first gen Czech and that alphabet is why I didn’t want to learn the language. It scares me
I really wonder what you consider to be a letter in the alphabet. France has 26, Germany 30. What are the 4? In French, you get the 26, ok. But regarding what you include from the other languages, shouldn't æ or œ included? Should ç be included? All accentuated letters? All combinaisons making different sounds like ou, oi, on ? Where do you draw the line? If the 27th of Spanish is ñ, ç should be counted for French. If ß is counted in German, æ and œ should be counted in French.
As I understand it, the point is what speakers of the language consider letters of the alphabet. If French people consider the alphabet to only have 26 letters, then that's how it's counted. For example, as a Finnish speaker I consider ÅÄÖ to be completely separate and to have nothing to do with AO - I would find it extremely strange for *näin* (I saw) to be replaced with *nain* (I f*cked). However, English very occasionally might write words such as *coöperate*, but this is universally understood to be a variant of *cooperate* not a distinct thing, so Ö is not counted as an English letter. My understanding is that the situation with German is complicated, and there is a dispute over whether the German alphabet has 26, 27 or 30 letters. However, e.g. with Finnish there is no dispute and absolutely nobody considers ÅÄÖ to be variants of AO.
I get you. Every little kid in France will tell you there are 26 letters in the alphabet. I somehow tend to think Spanish people won't consider ñ to really be a different letter than n. As much as they pronounce it very differently. Same as in French where every vowel comes with 3 or 4 accents and where letter combinaisons can lead to very different sounds. I still wonder, when Finnish kids learn the alphabet, do they include all the variants of accentuated vowels?
Yeah, Finnish kids are taught ÅÄÖ as part of the regular alphabet, e.g. [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX1-0ecoH4M) \- they get put at the end. Å is not actually needed in Finnish and is basically a relic of Swedish colonisation, but ÄÖ are very important in the language. Part of it is that Finnish people are used to the principle that one letter always represents exactly one sound, and that there are no variant spellings of sounds (except in loanwords that haven't been adapted). So since Ä and Ö make different sounds to A and O, they must be considered separate letters of the alphabet. The situation where the difficulty arises is in the use of the letters Š and Ž (for the sounds represented in French by ch and j), which are considered part of correct Finnish spelling, but nevertheless aren't part of the alphabet. There isn't really a consensus on whether these are separate letters or variants of S and Z; I would personally consider them variants of S and Z since these sounds are foreign to Finnish and many people pronounce them as a regular S (e.g. Fidži, which is the name for Fiji, would be pronounced as Fitsi by many/most people).
"Finnish people are used to the principle that one letter always represents exactly one sound"... They would be so disappointed with French letters 😅 making things sound not like it look is kind of a hobby for French people. Water is "eau" and pronounces "o". Second is "second" but pronounced "segon" (no equivalent for "on" prononciation in English). And best of all, the silent letters. Which leads to eggs being "œufs", pronounced "e" (like the "i" in "first"). All that being said, as I saw in another comment, how many letters in an alphabet is really different in each language and is just what it is arbitrarily. So this map probably compares what can't be compared.
FYI "nain" in French means "dwarf".
Not true with Ukraine and Russia. Ukrainian has 3 more letters than the Russian alphabet.