This article deals with the alphabet, punctuation and orthographic rules of the Spanish language. For detailed information on the pronunciation not found here, see also Spanish phonology. This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ... Image File history File links Please see the file description page for further information. ... There are two names given to the Spanish language: Spanish (español) and Castilian (castellano). ... The Spanish language developed from vulgar Latin, with influence from Basque and Arabic, in the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula (see Iberian Romance languages). ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... Spanish is a relatively inflected language, with a two-gender system and about fifty conjugated forms per verb, but no noun declension and limited pronominal declension. ... The Spanish language uses determiners in a similar way to English. ... The Spanish language has nouns that express concrete objects, groups and classes of objects, qualities, feelings and other abstractions. ... The Spanish language has a range of pronouns that in some ways work quite differently from English ones. ... The Spanish language uses adjectives in a similar way to English and most other Indo-European languages. ... The Spanish language has a relatively large number of prepositions. ... Spanish verbs are one of the most complex areas of Spanish grammar. ... Main article: Spanish verbs This is a paradigm of Spanish verbs, that is, a set of conjugation tables, for the model regular verbs and for some of the most common irregular verbs (see the article on Spanish irregular verbs for common patterns of irregularity that may help understanding this paradigm). ... Spanish verbs are a complex area of Spanish grammar, with many combinations of tenses, aspects and moods (up to fifty conjugated forms per verb). ... The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ... Phonetic (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a custom voice mailbox for the purpose of receiving all incoming voice messages as actual transcribed text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS... Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

Alphabet

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 the letter n with a tilde (ñ). The letters k and w appear only in loanwords (such as kilogramo, kiosco, karate, walkman, whisky). This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... The acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ... In linguistics, a, diaeresis, or dieresis (AE) (from Greek (diaerein), to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ... Ãœ, or ü, is a glyph which represents either a letter from several extended Latin alphabets, the letter U with umlaut, or a letter U with diaeresis. ... The tilde (~) is a grapheme with several uses. ... Ñ and ñ in Arial and Times New Roman, with an example word from Panare Ñ is a letter of the modern Roman alphabet formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. ...

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

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 (see the DRAE for the entries on ch and ll). However, in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies agreed to sort ch and ll as ordinary pairs of letters by request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while keeping them as distinct letters for other purposes. Thus for example ch, instead of being sorted between c and d as formerly, now comes between ce and ci. 1803 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated as the International Year of the Family and the International Year of the Sport and the Olympic Ideal. // Events January Bill Clinton January 1 : North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) goes into effect. ... The Association of Spanish Language Academies (Spanish: Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española) was created in Mexico in 1951 and represents the union of all the separate academies in the Spanish speaking world. ... UNESCO logo UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) is a specialized agency of the United Nations established in 1945. ...

Names of the letters

See International Phonetic Alphabet for the symbols used to represent pronunciation. This table does not feature the traditional names of the letters ch, ll, and rr, which are called che /tʃe/, elle /'eʎe/, and erre /'ere/. These names are habitually used in spelling. For example, chillón is spelt out as che, i, elle, o con acento, ene. Many Spanish speakers spell ch as ce hache, while ll is sometimes spelled out as doble ele. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ...

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, but with ll one does sometimes see lifts with buttons marked LLamar. A set of elevators or lifts, in the lower level of a train station. ...

Alternative names

The letters b and v were originally simply known as be and ve and pronounced accordingly. However, now that Spanish no longer distinguishes between these sounds, it has become necessary to add something to the names to tell them apart. The table above gives the standard names used in Spain. You may encounter some of the alternative names. Mexicans often say be grande/ve chica; Argentinians, be larga/ve corta; Catalans, be alta/ve baja; Puertorricans, 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 be dental, not realizing that if this were true, there would be no need for such names. Motto: Spanish: En Unión y Libertad (English: In Union and Liberty) Anthem: Himno Nacional Argentino Capital Buenos Aires Largest city Buenos Aires Official language(s) Spanish Government Federal republic  - President Néstor Carlos Kirchner (PJ) Independence From Spain   - May Revolution 25 May 1810   - Declared 9 July 1816   - Recognized 1821... Capital Barcelona Official languages Catalan, Spanish, Aranese Area  â€“ Total  â€“ % of Spain Ranked 6th in Spain  32 114 km²  6,3% Population  â€“ Total (2005)  â€“ % of Spain  â€“ Density Ranked 2nd in Spain  6 995 206  15,9%  217,82/km² GDP Total (2004) GDP: €157,124 billion GDP per /capita: $26,550... Motto: Latin: Joannes Est Nomen Eius; Spanish: Juan es su nombre (English: John is his name) Anthem: La Borinqueña Capital San Juan Largest city San Juan Official language(s) Spanish, English Government Commonwealth  - Governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá Independence None (U.S. territory with Commonwealth status)  Area    - Total 9...

It is sometimes suggested that the name of the letter r is ere when it is single, and erre when it is double.

I is occasionally known as i latina ("Latin i") to distinguish it from y, which is known as i griega ("Greek i"). The latter is a late borrowing from the Greek letter υ (upsilon). In turn, the letter y is occasionally known as ye. Upsilon (upper case , lower case ) is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet. ...

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

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

Pronunciations of c, z

For more information, see Spanish dialects and varieties.

The pronunciation of the letters c and z varies. For the most part, the Northern half of Spain is the only country that makes use of the /θe/ and /'θeta/ pronunciations for c and z, respectively. Most former-Spanish colonies, particularly those in North and South America, and the southern part of Spain as well, pronounce c and z identical to s, coming off as /se/ and /'seta/. Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ...

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. The Iberian Peninsula, or Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe. ... Catalan in Europe Catalan IPA: (català ) is a Romance language, the official language of Andorra and co-official in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Valencia (under the name Valencian) and Catalonia. ... Galician (Galician: galego) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia. ...

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. Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ... English spelling (or orthography), although largely phonemic, has more complicated rules than many other spelling systems used by languages written in alphabetic scripts. ...

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 acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ...

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 cöoperate. 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). In linguistics, a, diaeresis, or dieresis (AE) (from Greek (diaerein), to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ...

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. Hence, Spanish writes familia and Portuguese and Catalan have família, while all stress the first i. In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ...

An accent over the "closed" vowel 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. Paroxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the penultimate syllable, that is, the syllable before the last syllable, , the English word canasta. ... Proparoxytone is a linguistic term for a word with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, that is, the last but two, the English words acromegaly and operational. ...

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:

¿A dónde 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.)

Reform proposals

See also: Spelling reform of the Spanish language

There have been several initiatives to reform the spelling of Spanish: Andrés Bello succeeded in making his proposal official in several South American countries, but they later returned to the RAE standard. The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ... Andrés Bello Andrés Bello (Caracas, Venezuela, November 11, 1781 - Santiago, Chile, October 15, 1865), South American humanist, poet, lawmaker, philosopher, educator and philologist, whose work constitutes an important part of Spanish American culture. ... The Real Academia Española (Spanish for Royal Spanish Academy; often RAE) is the institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. ...

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 applied only in editions of his works or his wife's. Gabriel García Márquez raised the issue of reform during a congress at Zacatecas, and drew attention to the issue, but no resultant changes. The Academies, however, change several tidbits from time to time. Juan Ramón Jiménez (December 24, 1881 – May 29, 1958) was a Spanish poet. ... Zenobia Camprubí Aymar (c. ... Gabriel José García Márquez also known as Gabo, (born March 6, 1928) is a Colombian Nobel laureate in literature novelist, journalist, publisher, and political activist. ... Zacatecas is a city in Mexico, the capital of the state of Zacatecas. ...

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.