The main peculiarities in the Finnish alphabet are the two extra vowel letters "ä" and "ö" (accompanied by the Swedish "å", which is actually not needed for writing Finnish). In Finnish, these extra letters are collectively referred to as the "ääkköset" when they need to be distinguished from the ISO basic Latin alphabet; the word is a somewhat playful modification of "aakkoset", which is the Finnish for the alphabet as a whole. Another informal term is "skandit" or "skandimerkit", which is short for "skandinaaviset merkit" "Scandinavian characters" (however, the Danish and Norwegian variants "æ" and "ø" are usually not taken into account).