Alphabetical sorting is simple: A comes after B, next comes C, then D and so on all the way to Z…right?!

If only it were so easy! Consider the character Á—should it be sorted before A, after A or just like it was A (ignoring the accent)? The answer depends on language: Hungarian’s Á comes after A; in Spanish, the accent should be ignored. In many languages, Y comes between X and Z; however, Lithuanian orders Y before J. French has an interesting twist: sometimes strings are sorted by first comparing their letters from left to right then by comparing diacritics from right to left. Some languages even treat certain multi-character combinations as single letters, like CD in Welsh. If this doesn’t sound complex enough, alphabetization rules can change: for example, in 1994, the Congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies decreed that Spanish’s CH would no longer be considered a single, muilt-character letter combination! Continue reading →