Spanish orthography

Spanish orthography is the writing system for the Spanish language. It is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English and Irish, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes.

Alphabet

The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the Latin alphabet with one additional letter: eñe (‹ñ›), making exactly 27. Although the letters ‹k› and ‹w› are part of the alphabet, they appear mostly in loanwords such as karate, kilo and walkman. 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.

Spanish Alphabet

Letter	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I
Name	a	be	ce	de	e	efe	ge	hache	i
IPA	/a/	/b/	/k/, /θ/	/d/	/e/	/f/	/ɡ/, /x/	silent	/i/
Letter	J	K	L	M	N	Ñ	O	P	Q
Name	jota	ka	ele	eme	ene	eñe	o	pe	cu
IPA	/x/	/k/	/l/	/m/	/n/	/ɲ/	/o/	/p/	/k/
Letter	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
Name	erre	ese	te	u	uve	doble uve	equis	i griega	ceta
IPA	/r/	/s/	/t/	/u/	/b/	/b/, /w/, /ɡw/, /u/	/ks/	/ʝ/, /i/	/θ/

^a /θ/ has merged with /s/ in some dialects; see Ceceo

For details on Spanish pronunciation, see Spanish phonology and Wikipedia:IPA for Spanish.

For vowels, when acute accent and diaeresis marks are used (‹á, é, í, ó, ú› and ‹ü›) they are considered variants of the plain vowel letters, but ‹ñ› is considered a separate letter from ‹n›. This makes a difference when sorting alphabetically; ‹ñ› appears in dictionaries after ‹n›. For example, in a Spanish dictionary piñata comes after pinza.

There are three digraphs: ‹ch› (che), ‹ll› (elle / doble ele) and ‹rr› (doble erre). While che and elle were formerly considered separate letters, 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. Thus ‹ch› now comes between ‹ce› and ‹ci›, instead of being alphabetized between ‹c› and ‹d› as was formerly done. Despite their former status as separate letters of the alphabet, ‹ch›, ‹ll›, and ‹rr› have always been correctly capitalized as two Latin letters. The word chillón 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 *LLamar, but this double capitalization has always been incorrect according to RAE rules.

In Spanish text, the letters are ranked from most to least common ‹E A O S R N I D L C T U M P B G V Y Q H F Z J Ñ X W K› the vowels take around the 45% of the text.

Alternative names

Be and uve

The letters ‹b› and ‹v› were originally simply known as be and ve. However, there is no longer any distinction between the sounds of these letters—they are more commonly called be and uve; in some regions, speakers may instead add something to the names to distinguish them. Some Mexicans and most Peruvians generally say be grande / ve chica ('big B' / 'little V'); Argentinians and Chileans, be larga / ve corta ('long B' / 'short V'). Some people give examples of words spelt with the letter; e.g., be de burro / ve de vaca ('b of burro' / 'v of vaca'). Regardless of these regional differences, all Spanish-speaking people recognize be as the official name of B.

Erre

The digraph ‹rr› is sometimes called doble erre or erre doble. 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 the name of ‹r› as erre or ere. The name ere is used when referring specifically to the alveolar tap /ɾ/ and erre referring to the alveolar trill /r/. The two contrast between vowels, with the latter being represented with ‹rr›, but the sounds are otherwise in complementary distribution so that a single ‹r› may represent either. As a referent to the trill sound rather than the phoneme, erre can refer to a single or double ‹r›.

Doble uve

In America, it is sometimes called doble ve, ve doble, doble uve. Because of the English acculturation, in Mexico the letter is usually called doble u (like English "double u"). In Spain it is usually called uve doble.

I

Because of its origin, it is occasionally known as i latina ('Latin ‹i›') to distinguish it from i griega ('Greek ‹i›'), also called ye.

I Griega

The most common form is i griega, but it has been superseded by ye in an effort to standardize on a single-word name as opposed to a two-worded one. The name ye is one of the newest proposed changes specified by the 2010 new common orthography. Its aim is to standardize on a single-word name for this letter (as opposed to i griega).

Ceta

It is usually written zeta, but ceta is the orthographically correct form (both have the same pronunciation). In older Spanish, it was called zeda or ceda, which are the origin of the word cedilla, which is also used in English.

Orthography

Spanish orthography is such that every speaker can figure out the pronunciation of a word from its written form. These rules are similar to, but not the same as, those of other peninsular languages, such as Portuguese, Catalan and Galician.

A number of the writing system's rules lead to potential homophony. These include the silent ‹h›, the lack of distinction between ‹b› and ‹v›, or ‹c› and ‹z› before ‹e i›, as well as some dialectal mergers such as that between ‹y› and ‹ll›, and between ‹c z› and ‹s›. In this way, a number of spellings could represent the same pronunciation. Nevertheless, the orthography is far more transparent than, for example, 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 if it does not follow the normal pattern, or to differentiate words that are otherwise spelled identically (this is the true diacritic usage).

A silent ‹u› is used between ‹g› and ‹e i› to indicate a hard ‹g› pronunciation, so that ‹gue› represents /ɡe/ and ‹gui› represents /ɡi/. The letter ‹ü› (‹u› with diaeresis,) is used in this context to indicate that the ‹u› is not silent. The diaeresis may occur also in Spanish poetry, occasionally, over either vowel of a diphthong, to indicate an irregular disyllabic pronunciation required by the meter (viüda, to be pronounced as three syllables). This is analogous to the use of ‹ï› in naïve in English.

Also a silent ‹u› always follows a ‹q› when followed by ‹e i›, as in queso, química, but there is no case for the combination *‹qü›. There are no native words in Spanish with the combination ‹qua› nor ‹quo›. When they appear, usually from Latin idioms such as statu quo, the ‹u› is always pronounced, so ‹ü› is never needed after ‹q›.

Stress and accentuation

Written Spanish unequivocally marks stress through a series of orthographic rules. The default stress is on the penultimate (next-to-last) syllable on words that end in a vowel, ‹n› or ‹s› and on the final syllable when the word ends in any consonant other than ‹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 cluster, or no sound at all, and a represents a vowel, diphthong, or triphthong. Diphthongs and triphthongs are any combination of two and three vowels, respectively. Hence, Spanish writes familia and Portuguese and Catalan have família, while all stress the first ‹i›. The letter ‹h› is not considered an interruption between vowels (with some exception, as in alcohol, which in careful speech has three syllables).

An accent over the close vowel (‹i› or ‹u›) of a diphthong breaks up the diphthong (i.e., it signals a hiatus): for example, tía, and país have two syllables each.

A word with final stress is called oxytone (or 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. (Spanish words can be stressed only on one of the last three syllables, except in the case of a verb form with enclitic pronouns, such as poniéndoselo.) All proparoxytones and sobresdrújulas have a written accent mark.

Differential accents

Blackboard used in a university classroom shows students' efforts at placing ‹ü› and acute accent diacritic used in Spanish orthography.

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 and the relative pronoun is not:

¿Adónde vas? 'Where are you going?'

Adonde no puedas encontrarme. 'Where you cannot find me.'

The use of ó is poetic for the vocative: ¡Ó señor! The use of ‹ó› for the word o (meaning 'or') is a hypercorrection. Up until 2010, ‹ó› was used when applied to numbers: 7 ó 9 ('7 or 9'), to avoid possible confusion with the digit 0. The tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies deemed the use an accent unnecessary, as typewriting eliminates possible confusion due to the different shapes of ‹0› and ‹o›.

These diacritics are often called acentos diacríticos or tildes diacríticas in traditional Spanish grammar.

Capitalization

Capitalization in Spanish is sparse compared to English. In general, only personal and place names, some abbreviations (e.g. Sr. López, but señor López), the first word (only) in the title of a book, movie, song, etc., and the first word in a sentence are capitalized, as are names of companies, government bodies, etc. Names of nationalities or languages are not capitalized, nor (in standard style) are days of the week and months of the year.

Older conventions

In Old Spanish, ‹x› was used to represent the voiceless palatal sound /ʃ/ (as in dixo 'he/she said'), while ‹j› represented the voiced palatal /ʒ/ (as in fijo 'son'). With the changes of sibilants in the 16th century, the two sounds merged as /ʃ/ (later to become velar /x/), and the letter ‹j› was chosen for the single resulting phoneme. When Cervantes wrote Don Quixote he spelled the name in the old way (and English preserves the ‹x›), but modern editions in Spanish spell it with ‹j›. For the use of ‹x› in Mexico — and in the name México itself — see below.

The letter ‹ç› (c-cedilla) — which was first used in Old Spanish — is now obsolete in Spanish, having merged with ‹z› in a process similar to that of ‹x› and ‹j›.

Words spelled in modern Spanish with cua- (cuando, cuatro, etc.) were written with qua- up until around 1815.

The use of accent marks in publishing varies with different historical periods, due mainly to reforms promulgated by the Spanish Royal Academy. For example, many of the words that are today standardly written with an accent mark appeared more often without it up until around 1880. These include words with final stress ending in -n (e.g. capitán, también, jardín, acción, común — but not future-tense verb forms like serán, tendrán); verbs in the imperfect tense (tenía, vivían); the possessives mío and mía; and the word día. Meanwhile, one-letter words other than the conjunction y — namely the preposition a and the conjunctions e (the form of y before an [i] sound), o, and u (form of o before [o]) — are generally written with accent marks from the mid 1700s to about 1910. The accent-marked infinitive oír begins to outnumber the unaccented form around 1920. Monosyllabic preterit verb forms such as dio and fue were usually written with accent marks before the 1950s.

Reform proposals

See also: Bello orthography

In spite of the regular orthography of Spanish (especially when compared to English), 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 those of his wife, Zenobia Camprubí. Gabriel García Márquez raised the issue of reform during a congress at Zacatecas, most notoriously advocating for the suppression of ‹h›, which is mute in Spanish, but, despite his prestige, no serious changes were adopted. The Academies, however, from time to time have made minor changes, such as allowing este instead of éste ('this one'), when there is no possible confusion.

Mexican Spanish convention is to spell certain indigenous words with ‹x› rather than the ‹j› that would be the standard spelling in Spanish. This is generally due to the origin of the word (or the present pronunciation) containing the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ sound or another sibilant that is not used in modern standard Spanish. The most noticeable word with this feature is México (see Toponymy of Mexico). The Real Academia Española recommends this spelling. (The North American Spanish colloquial term chicano is shortened from mechicano, which uses /tʃ/ in place of the /ʃ/ of contra-Madridian/rural Mexican Spanish /meʃikano/.)

See also

• Inverted question and exclamation marks

Bibliography

• Penny, Ralph (2002). A History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521011841.

External links

• A la nación española: Sobre reformas ortográficas, Mariano Cubí i Soler, Imprenta de Miguel i Jaime Gaspar, Barcelona, 1852 (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica).
• Collation in Spanish
• Ortografía de la lengua española published by the Real Academia Española (RAE).
• Spanish Alphabet Pronunciation — simplified for beginners to Spanish letter pronunciation.
• Spanish/Pronunciation — Wikibook with extensive coverage of the Spanish letter pronunciation.