Spanish orthography

Spanish orthography (the alphabet, punctuation and orthographic rules of the Spanish language) is largely derived from a combination of Latin and Arabic, as well as the influence of other Iberian languages. For detailed information on the pronunciation not found here, see also Spanish phonology.

Alphabet

Letters and letter names

The Spanish language is written using the Latin alphabet, with a few special letters: the vowels with an acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú), the vowel u with diaeresis (ü), and ñ. The letters k and w appear only in loanwords (such as karate or walkman).

A	a /a/	J	jota /'hota/ or /'xota/	R	erre /'ere/
B	be /be/	K	ca /ka/	S	ese /'ese/
C	ce /se/ or /θe/	L	ele /'ele/	T	te /t̪e/
D	de /d̪e/	M	eme /'eme/	U	u /u/
E	e /e/	N	ene /'ene/	V	ve /be/ or uve /'uβe/
F	efe /'efe/	Ñ	eñe /'eɲe/	W	doble ve /doβ̞̞le 'β̞̞e/ or uve doble /'uβe 'doβ̞̞le/ or doble u /doβ̞̞le 'u/
G	ge /he/ or /xe/	O	o /o/	X	equis /'ekis/
H	hache /'atʃe/	P	pe /pe/	Y	ye /ʝe/ or i griega /i'ɰɾjeɰa/
I	i /i/	Q	cu /ku/	Z	ceta /'seta/ or /θeta/

See International Phonetic Alphabet for the symbols used to represent pronunciation.

The vowels with accents and diaeresis are considered variants of the plain vowel letters, but ñ is considered a letter in its own right, and so it appears in dictionaries after n. Therefore, for example, in a Spanish dictionary piñata comes after pinza.

Traditionally, the digraph rr was considered a separate letter, but this is no longer the case; the digraphs ch and ll have been considered separate letters since 1803. However, in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies agreed to alphabetize ch and ll as ordinary pairs of letters in the dictionary by request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while keeping them as distinct letters for the alphabet and other purposes. Thus for example ch, instead of being alphabetized between c and d as formerly, now comes between ce and ci.

The fact that these are separate letters is not supposed to affect capitalisation. Therefore, the word chillón in a text written in all caps should be CHILLÓN and not ChILLÓN, and if it is the first word of a sentence, it is written Chillón, not CHillón. This rule is respected with ch and with ll. With ll one does sometimes see lifts with buttons marked LLamar, but that is wrong according to RAE rules.

Alternative names

This table does not feature the traditional name of the digraph rr, which is sometimes called doble erre or erre doble. These names are habitually used in spelling. For example, chillón is spelt out as che, i, elle, o con acento, ene. Some Spanish speakers spell ch as ce ache, while ll is sometimes spelled out as doble ele.

The letters b and v were originally simply known as be and ve. However, as Spanish doesn't distinguish between these sounds, it is necessary to add something to the names to tell them apart. You may encounter some of the alternative names. Mexicans often say be grande / ve chica ("big B" / "small V"); Argentinians, be larga / ve corta ("wide B" / "narrow V"); Catalans, be alta / ve baja ("tall B" / "short V"); Puerto Ricans, be / uve. Some people give examples of words spelt with the letter e. g. be de burro / ve de vaca. Some people even call them be labial and ve labiodental, not realizing that if this were true, there would be no need for such names.

It is sometimes suggested that the name of the letter r be ere when it is single, and erre when it is double, but the dictionary of the Real Academia Española defines it as erre.

I is occasionally known as i latina ("Latin i") to distinguish it from y, which is known as i griega ("Greek i"). The letter y is also known as ye.

W can be doble ve, ve doble, or doble u, or uve doble, or even uvedoble.

Z is usually called ceta or zeta (both pronounced the same), or occasionally ceda or zeda (again, both pronounced the same).

Pronunciation of c and z

Further information: [[:Spanish dialects and varieties]]

The pronunciation of the letters c (before e or i) and z varies. Generally speaking, in central and northern Spain, c ([θe]) and z (['θeta]) are clearly distinguished from s ([ese]). In Spanish speaking regions of North and South America, and in the southern part of Spain, c and z are pronounced identically to s. The names of the letters are thus pronounced [se], ['seta], and [ese]. A minority of speakers pronounce all three letters as [θ]; see Ceceo for a detailed discussion.

Orthography

Spanish orthography is such that every speaker can guess the pronunciation (adapted for accent) from the written form. These rules are similar, but not the same, as those of other peninsular languages as Portuguese, Catalan and Galician.

While the same pronunciation could be misspelt in several ways — there are homophones, because of the language's silent h, vacillations between b and v, and between c and z (and between c, z, and s in Latin America and some parts of the Peninsula) — the orthography is far more coherent than, say, English orthography.

Special and modified letters

The vowels can be marked with an acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) for two purposes: to mark stress when it does not follow the normal pattern; or to differentiate otherwise equally spelt words (this is the true diacritic usage).

The letter ü (u with diaeresis) is used between g and e or i to indicate that it should be pronounced (that is, gu = [gw]). Otherwise, gue and gui are pronounced with a hard g and ignoring the medial u. The diaeresis should not be confused with an umlaut mark; its function is related to the archaic use of ï in naïve or ö in coöperate in English. In this function the diaeresis may occur also in Spanish poetry, occasionally, over the first vowel of a diphthong, to indicate an irregular disyllabic pronunciation required by the metre (viüda, to be pronounced as three syllables).

The letter ñ indicates the palatal nasal /ɲ/.

Stress

Written Spanish unequivocally marks stress through a series of orthographic rules. The default stress is on the final syllable when the word ends in any consonant other than -n or -s and on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable on words that end in a vowel, n or s. Words that do not follow the default stress have an acute accent over the stressed vowel.

Note that unlike Portuguese or Catalan, Spanish rules count syllables, not vowels, to assign written accents. A syllable is of the form XaXX, where X represents a consonant, permissible consonant blend, or no sound at all and a represents a vowel, diphthong, or triphthong. Diphthongs and triphthongs are any combination of: two vowels, one of which is either i or u; or three consecutive vowels, the first and last of which include i or u; the letter h is not considered an interruption between vowels. Hence, Spanish writes familia and Portuguese and Catalan have família, while all stress the first i.

An accent over the "closed" vowel (i or u) of a diphthong breaks the diphthong (i. e. it produces a hiatus): for example, tía, and país have two syllables each.

A word with final stress is called oxytone, (aguda in traditional Spanish grammar texts); a word with penultimate stress is called paroxytone (llana or grave); a word with antepenultimate stress (stress on the third last syllable) is called proparoxytone (esdrújula). A word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier does not have a common linguistic term in English, but in Spanish receives the name sobresdrújula. All proparoxtyones and sobresdrújulas have written accent marks.

Diacritic accents

In a number of cases, homonyms are distinguished with written accents on the stressed (or only) syllable: for example, te (informal object case of "you") vs. té ("tea"); se (third person reflexive) vs. sé ("I know" or imperative "be"); tu (informal "your") vs. tú (informal subject case of "you"). When relative and interrogative pronouns have the same letters (as is often the case), the interrogative pronoun is accented:

¿Adónde vas? "Where are you going?"

Donde no puedas encontrarme. "Where you cannot find me."

(The second "donde" is pronounced the same but lacks a written accent.)

The use of ó is poetic for the vocative: ¡Ó señor! The use of ó for the word o (meaning "or") is a hypercorrection, though ó is used when applied to numbers: 7 ó 9 ("7 or 9"), to avoid possible confusion with the number 0.

Reform proposals

Spanish orthography is such that every speaker can know the pronunciation from the written form. While the same pronunciation could be misspelt in several ways — there are homophones, because of the language's silent h, vacillations between b and v, between ll and y, between g and j, and between c and z (and between c, z and s for 90% of the speakers) — the orthography is far more coherent than, for example, English orthography.

In spite of that, there have been several initiatives to reform its spelling: Andrés Bello succeeded in making his proposal official in several South American countries, but they later returned to the standard set by the Real Academia Española. Another initiative, the Ortografia Fonetika Rasional Ispanoamerikana, remained a curiosity. Juan Ramón Jiménez proposed changing -ge- and -gi to -je- and ji, but this is only applied in editions of his works or his wife's. Gabriel García Márquez raised the issue of reform during a congress at Zacatecas, most notoriously advocating for the supression of the letter h, which is mute in Spanish, but, with all his prestige, he got attention but nothing going. The Academies however from time to time change several tidbits, such as allowing este instead of éste ("this one"), when there is no possible confusion.

Mexican Spanish will spell certain indigenous words with x rather than the j that the RAE would recommend. This is generally due to the origin of the word (or the present pronunciation) containing the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ ("sh") sound or another sibilant that is not used in modern standard Spanish. The most noticeable word with this feature is México, which RAE would prefer as Méjico. (The Northamerican Spanish colloquial term "chicano" is shortened from "mechicano", which uses "ch" in place of the /ʃ/ of contra-Madridian/rural Mexican Spanish /meʃikano/.)

See also

• Inverted question mark and exclamation point in Spanish

External links

• Spanish Alphabet — Interactive Spanish Alphabet. You will learn how to pronounce all the letters by themselves and in several words.
• Spanish Alphabet - e Learn Spanish Language — Site including .wav files with the pronunciations of all of the traditional 30 letters of the Spanish alphabet.
• Spanish/Pronunciation — Wikibook with extensive coverage of the Spanish letter pronunciation.
• Collation in Spanish