english language “insticts” are a terrible place to start for most languages using latin letters. if you start from what the letters meant in latin and know a little bit of what the hell went on in the middle ages (or are at least vaguely familiar with the spelling of a few european languages), these arent that odd. okay, the å is, because that’s a uniquely nordic replacement for “aa”, the older spelling. and the pronunciation has shifted over the centuries to an o-like sound.

but ä/ö are pretty standard forms for what used to be ‘ae’ and ‘oe’ (or æ and œ). they sound pretty similar to german or finnish (or a bunch of others) ä/ö, even when they’re not identical.