After the opening ceremony at the Tokyo Olympics last summer, NBC, the official broadcaster of the event in the U.S., reported some viewers were "confused” at the order by which the teams entered.
That’s because the participating teams didn’t enter according to the English alphabetical order, but by the order set in the Japanese language. That meant Iceland entered second after Greece, which always comes first in what’s known as the Parade of Nations as it’s the historical founding nation of the Olympics.
Things get much more complicated at the coming winter games in China, however, as the Chinese language does not have an alphabet. Instead, indexing in the language for the opening ceremony is done according to stroke order, which arranges words based on how many strokes the first character of the word has, and then the order by which the strokes are written — the straight horizontal stroke comes before the straight vertical stroke, for example.