Spanish orthography
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 and book titles capitalize only the first word.
Spanish uses only the acute accent over any vowel:. This accent is used to mark the tonic syllable, though it may also be used occasionally to distinguish homophones such as si and sí. 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 bilingüe —to indicate that the is pronounced, rather than having the usual silent role that it plays in unmarked and .
In contrast with English, Spanish has an official body that governs linguistic rules, orthography among them: the Royal Spanish Academy, which makes periodic changes to the orthography. The 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, eñe, 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: Squatting in Spain#Okupa,. Each letter has a single official name according to the Real Academia Española's new 2010 Common Orthography, but in some regions alternative traditional names coexist as explained below. The digraphs and were considered single letters of the alphabet from 1754 to 2010. Letters in red were, but are no longer, part of the alphabet.| Uppercase | A | B | C | Ch | D | E | F | G | H | I |
| Lowercase | a | b | c | ch | d | e | f | g | h | i |
| Name | a | be | ce | che | de | e | efe | ge | hache | i |
| Phoneme | , | , | silent |
The digraph represents the affricate. The digraph was formerly treated as a single letter, called che.
The phonemes and are not distinguished in most dialects; see seseo.
With the exception of some loanwords:,,, which have.
| Uppercase | J | K | L | Ll | M | N | Ñ | O | P | Q |
| Lowercase | j | k | l | ll | m | n | ñ | o | p | q |
| Name | jota | ka | ele | elle | eme | ene | eñe | o | pe | cu |
| Phoneme | , |
The digraph represents the palatal lateral in a few dialects; but in most dialects—because of the historical merger called yeísmo—it, like the letter, represents the phoneme.
The exact realization of nasals in syllable-final position depends on phonetic attributes of following consonants so that can represent a nasal that is labial, palatal, velar, etc. In rare instances, word-final is used, but there is no actual pronunciation difference.
Used only in the digraph.
| Uppercase | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
| Lowercase | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z |
| Name | erre | ese | te | u | uve, ve, ve corta, ve baja, ve chica | uve doble, ve doble, doble ve, doble u | equis | ye, i griega | zeta |
| Phoneme | , | , | , | , |
The digraph, which only appears between vowels, represents the trill.
Old orthography with the letter representing has been preserved in some proper names such as Name of Mexico.
For details on Spanish pronunciation, see Spanish phonology and Help:IPA/Spanish.
When acute accent and diaeresis marks are used on vowels they are considered variants of the plain vowel letters, but is considered a separate letter from. This makes a difference when sorting alphabetically: appears in dictionaries after. For example, in a Spanish dictionary comes after.
There are five digraphs: , , , and . While che and elle were each formerly treated as a single letter, in 1994 the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies 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 cu- as was formerly done.
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 CHILLÓN, not *ChILlÓN, and if it is the first word of a sentence, it is written Chillón, not *CHillón. Sometimes, one finds lifts with buttons marked, but this double capitalization has always been incorrect according to RAE rules.
This is the list of letters from most to least frequent in Spanish texts: ; the vowels make up around 45% of the text.
Alternative names
;B and V;R
;W
;I
;Y
;Z
Other characters
Besides the letters, other characters are specially associated with Spanish-language texts:- The currency symbols of Spanish-language countries: , , , , .
- , abbreviation of or
- and are used in abbreviations like 1.º, 1.ª or D.ª ; in ordinal numbers they match the grammatical gender of the noun being modified: masculine and feminine. N.º can be represented as one character.
- is the symbol of the arroba, a pre-metric unit of weight.
- 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:
- 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, but can also represent or, especially in proper nouns from times of Old Spanish.
The converse does not always hold, i.e. for a given pronunciation there may be multiple possible spellings, as a result of decisions by the Royal Spanish Academy. The main issues are:
- the use of both and for ;
- the use of both and for before and ;
- the silent ;
- the occasional use of accents to distinguish two words that sound the same, such as /, /, and / .
- the use of and ;
- *the use of /, and as part of a rising diphthong at the beginning of words ;
- the use of and , either for or for ;
- the use of and the letter combinations and before and, either for or for ;
- the use of, and before a vowel for ;
- the use of both and for before consonants.
The Ortografía includes a series of "rules of thumb" on using the letters,,,,, and. For example, verbs ending in -bir are spelled with, except,,, and their derivatives.
| sound | before | elsewhere |
| or | or | |
| or | ||
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 -ze- or -qua-:
- : qu↔c: → ; → .
- : c↔z: → ; → .
- : gü↔gu: → ; → .
- : gu↔g: → ; → .
- : g→j: → . But in verbs ending in -jar, the is kept before : → .