Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Spanish punctuation uniquely includes the use of inverted question and exclamation marks: .
Spanish uses capital letters much less often than English; they are not used on adjectives derived from proper nouns (e.g. , , from , , and , respectively) and book titles capitalize only the first word (e.g. ).
Spanish uses only the acute accent over any vowel: . This accent is used to mark the tonic (stressed) syllable, though it may also be used occasionally to distinguish homophones such as and . The only other diacritics used are the tilde on the letter , which is considered a separate letter from , and the diaeresis used in the sequences and —as in —to indicate that the is pronounced , rather than having the usual silent role that it plays in unmarked and .
Unlike English, Spanish has an official body that governs linguistic rules, orthography among them: the Royal Spanish Academy (; RAE), which makes periodic changes to the orthography. Its currently valid work on orthography is the , published in 2010.
Alphabet in Spanish
The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the ISO Latin script with one additional letter, , for a total of 27 letters. Although the letters and are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords (such as , , and ) and in sensational spellings (such as and ). Each letter has a single official name according to the RAE's new 2010 Common Orthography, but in some regions alternative names are used.
There are five digraphs: ("" or ""), ("" or ""), (""), ("") and (""). While and were each formerly treated as a single letter, in 1994 the tenth congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language agreed to alphabetize and as ordinary sequences of letters. Spain requested the change at the behest of UNESCO and the European Union, in an effort to facilitate translation and computing. Thus, for example, in dictionaries, is alphabetized after and before , instead of being alphabetized after all words beginning with as was formerly done."" Real Academia Española. Explanation at spanishpronto.com (in Spanish and English) Despite their former status as unitary letters of the alphabet, and have always been treated as sequences with regard to the rules of capitalization. Thus the word in a text written in all caps is , not , and if it is the first word of a sentence, it is written , not . Sometimes, one finds lifts with buttons marked , but this double capitalization has always been incorrect according to RAE rules.
When acute accent and diaeresis marks are used on vowels (, , , , and ), they are considered variants of the plain vowel letters. The consonant is considered a separate letter from . This makes a difference when sorting alphabetically: appears in dictionaries after .
From most to least frequent, letters used in Spanish texts are: ;Fletcher Pratt, Secret and Urgent: the Story of Codes and Ciphers Blue Ribbon Books, 1939, pp. 254-255. vowels make up around 45% of the text. +LetterNamePhoneme(s)A aB b, , C c, ~Ch chD dE eF fG g, H hsilent, I i, J jK kL lLl ll~M m, N n, , Ñ ñO oP pQ qR r, Rr rr, S sT tU u, V v, , , , W w, , , , X x, Y y, , Z z~
Alternative names
B and V The letters and were originally simply known as and , which in modern Spanish are pronounced identically. In Old Spanish, they likely represented different sounds, but the sounds merged later. Their usual names are and ; in some regions, speakers may instead add something to the names to distinguish them. Some Mexicans and most Peruvians generally say / ('big B' / 'little V'); Argentines, Uruguayans and Chileans, / ('long B' / 'short V'). Some people give examples of words spelled with the letter; e.g., / ('b as in ' / 'v as in '); Colombians tend to say for B and for V. In Venezuela, they call B and V , or and ('tall B' / 'short V'). Regardless of these regional differences, all Spanish-speaking people recognize as the official name of B. R The digraph is sometimes called or . It is sometimes suggested that the name of the letter be when it is single, and when it is double, but the dictionary of the Real Academia Española defines the name of as . is considered obsolete. The name was used when referring specifically to the alveolar tap and referring to the alveolar trill . The two contrast between vowels, with the latter being represented with , but the sounds are otherwise in complementary distribution so that a single may represent either. W In Hispanic American Spanish, is sometimes called , , or . In Colombia, Mexico, and in some Central American countries, because of English acculturation, the letter is usually called (like English "double u"). In Spain, it is usually called . I Because of its origin, is occasionally known as ("Latin i") to distinguish it from , which is known as ("Greek i"). Y The most common name for in Spain is , but it has been commonly superseded in Hispanic American Spanish by in an effort to standardize on a one-word name, as opposed to a name consisting of two words. Using as the only name for the letter is one of the newest proposed changes specified by the 2010 new common orthography. Z The name for is (formerly also spelled , pronounced the same). In older Spanish, it was called or , and the diminutive form of this word, , is now used in both Spanish and English to refer to the diacritic mark exhibited in the letter .
Other characters Besides the letters, other characters are specially associated with Spanish-language texts: The currency symbols of Spanish-language countries: (centavo), (colón), (peseta), (peso), (Paraguayan guaraní). , abbreviation of or ('each one') and are used in abbreviations like , (, 'first') or (""); in ordinal numbers they match the grammatical gender of the noun being modified: masculine and feminine . (, 'number') can be represented as one character . is the symbol of the arroba, a pre-metric unit of weight (about 11.502 kg, 25.3 pounds). and are used at the beginning of interrogative and exclamatory sentences, respectively. They are also used in the middle of a sentence if only part of the sentence is a question or exclamation: ("John started eating and wow!") The guillemets () and are used in formal settings in the same sense as quotation marks, although they are very uncommon in informal usage.
Orthography Orthographic principles Spanish orthographic rules are similar, but not identical, to those of other Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Portuguese, Catalan and Galician.
In general, the orthography of Spanish is such that the pronunciation of most words is unambiguous given their written form. The main exception is the letter , which usually represents (or at the beginning of a word and, for some speakers, before consonants), but it can also occasionally represent , or (noninitially) , particularly in names of North American places and cuisine (e.g. ; ; , pronounced so even by speakers who normally pronounce before consonants) and in some traditional spellings of personal names dating from Old Spanish (e.g. ).
The converse does not always hold—for a given pronunciation there may be multiple possible spellings, as a result of decisions by the RAE. The main issues are: use of both and for use of both and for before and silent occasional use of differential accents to distinguish two words that sound the same, such as / , / , and /
For some speakers, additional problems may come from: use of and () use of / , and (less commonly) as part of a rising diphthong at the beginning of words (variant of ); use of and (as well as and before and ), either for () or for () use of (also in a few prefixed words) and the letter combinations and before and , either for () or for () use of , and before a vowel for ; use of both and for before consonants (in a few Greek-derived words, is used for word-initial from etymological ξ).
The use of and , and , and the silent is mostly based on etymology. In particular, in many cases is not a continuation of Old Spanish (which often had in place of intervocalic as a result of Vulgar Latin merger, as in other Romance languages), but an artificial restitution based on Latin: 'horse' is spelled as Latin and unlike French , Italian , Portuguese , or Catalan . The letter is used in place of Latin and (in a few words also ): < , < , < . Additionally, is a purely orthographical sign used before word-initial rising diphthongs. However, in some words RAE mandated counter-etymological spellings because of established tradition of usage, e.g. < .
The includes a series of "rules of thumb" on using the letters , , , , , and . For example, verbs ending in are spelled with , except , , , and their derivatives.
+ Use of different letters for the same sound sound before elsewhere (or in some loanwords) or or (or in some loanwords) (or in some loanwords) or (or in Mexico) (or in Mexico)
In some Spanish verbs, the same stem is spelled differently before different verb endings. This is required to keep the regularity of the conjugated forms in terms of sound, when a letter represents different sounds, or to avoid unusual combinations, such as or : : ↔: → (); → (). : ↔: → (); → (). : ↔: → (); → (). : ↔: → (); → (). : →: → (). But in verbs ending in , the is kept before : → (not ).
The same occurs in other parts of speech when combined with certain suffixes, such as / for nouns and pronouns or / for adjectives and adverbs: → ; → ; → ; → ; → ; → ; → ; → . Likewise, nouns and adjectives ending in change this letter to in the plural for similar reasons: → ; → .
Letter-to-sound correspondences Consonants