The Spanish Alphabet

Spanish has 27 letters. It is the only major European alphabet with the ñ, the only one where the h is silent by default, and one of the very few where the rules for stress and accents are genuinely regular. Once you have spent ten minutes with the rules, you can read aloud any Spanish word you have never seen before and be right almost every time.

This page covers the 27 letters with their official Spanish names and sounds, the diacritics (acute accent, dieresis), and the regional consonant differences that the apps gloss over. If you want the editorial answer to which accent to learn, that lives at the Spanish accent guide.

The 27 letters

That is the canonical list as published by the Real Academia Española in the 2010 Ortografía. Two letters that used to count as separate, the digraphs ch (che) and ll (elle), were demoted to "two-letter sequences" in 1994 and the change was finalised in 2010. Pre-2010 Spanish dictionaries you might still own list them as separate; modern dictionaries file them under c and l. They still represent distinctive sounds; they just no longer count as letters of the alphabet.

The five vowels

The single best thing about reading Spanish aloud is that the vowels are honest. Each of the five vowels has exactly one sound and you can always trust it.

• a = "ah" (casa, padre, Madrid)
• e = "eh" (mesa, queso)
• i = "ee" (libro, amigo)
• o = "oh" (loco, ojo)
• u = "oo" (luna, mucho)

This is why Spanish does not have the bewildering "a" of English (cat / car / cake / want / above all spelt the same way). A Spanish vowel sounds the same in every word it appears in. The diphthongs (ai, ei, au, eu, ue, ie, etc.) are just two of those clean vowel sounds run together; no surprises.

The Ñ

The ñ is not just a stylish n with a hat. It is a distinct letter, a distinct sound, and the only letter in the standard Spanish alphabet that does not exist in English. Pronounced "ny", like the ny in English canyon or ni in onion. It comes from medieval Spanish scribes saving paper by writing a small "n" above another "n" to indicate the doubled nasal sound; the small "n" became the tilde we have now.

Spanish words where the ñ matters:

• año (year) vs ano (anus). The most-cited example of why the tilde matters.
• niño (child), señor (sir), mañana (tomorrow), España (Spain), pequeño (small).

Typing ñ on a non-Spanish keyboard:

• Windows: Alt + 0241 (lowercase) or Alt + 0209 (uppercase) on the numeric keypad.
• macOS: Option + n, then n again.
• iOS / Android: long-press the n on the on-screen keyboard.
• Spanish keyboard: it has its own dedicated key, between the L and the semicolon.

The silent H

Spanish h is silent. Every time. There is no exception in standard Spanish. Hola is pronounced "OH-lah". Hospital is "os-pee-TAL". Hablar is "ah-BLAR".

The h is a fossil from the older Latin and Arabic-influenced ancestor of Spanish, kept in spelling for etymological reasons and dropped from pronunciation centuries ago. It only ever surfaces audibly in the ch digraph (where it represents a distinct "ch" sound, as in chocolate / mucho / noche). Outside of ch, a written h tells you nothing about how to say a word.

That said, the silent h is not invisible. Spanish spelling rules treat it as a consonant for the purpose of accentuation; the indefinite article is un (not "una") before a masculine noun starting with stressed ha- (un alma, un hacha) because the stress falls on the first vowel anyway.

The C / Z / S distinction

The single biggest regional difference in Spanish pronunciation is what speakers do with the letters c (before e or i), z, and s.

• Distinción (Spain, central and northern peninsula): the c before e/i and the z are both pronounced "th" as in English think. The s is "s". So "cinco" is "thinko", "zapato" is "thapato", "casa" is "kasa".
• Seseo (almost all of Latin America, the Canaries, and parts of Andalusia): the c before e/i, the z, and the s are all pronounced "s". So "cinco" is "sinko", "zapato" is "sapato", "casa" is "kasa".

Neither is more correct. Distinción is the older sound that Spain retained; seseo is the standard across Latin America and was already common in southern Spain when the language crossed the Atlantic. A third variant, ceceo (the s also sounding like "th"), is heard in some parts of Andalusia and is mocked by other Spanish-speakers in a way that distinción and seseo never are.

For learners: pick whichever you like. The choice tells listeners where you learned the language, not how well. The honest recommendation for most adult learners is to copy whichever variety dominates the people you will actually be speaking it with. If you have no specific country in mind, seseo is the safer default by speaker count.

The G / J split

The Spanish g has two sounds and the j has one. The two letters share territory:

• g before a, o, u = hard "g" as in English go. Gato, gota, gusto.
• g before e or i = harsh "h", the same as j. Gente, gigante.
• j = always the harsh "h" sound, whatever vowel follows. Jota, Juan, jefe.
• gu before e or i = hard g (the u is silent and exists to keep the g hard). Guerra, guitarra.
• gü before e or i = hard g plus the u IS pronounced. The dieresis (the two dots) signals this. Vergüenza, pingüino.

The harsh "h" sound (sometimes written as IPA /x/) is stronger than the English h. It is the sound in Scottish loch or German Bach. In southern Spain and most of Latin America, the j is softer, often closer to a standard English h; in northern Spain, it is harsher and more guttural.

Accent marks (tildes)

Spanish uses one diacritic on its vowels for stress: the acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú). It is called the tilde in Spanish (which is confusing because English calls the ñ wave a tilde; the Spanish word covers both).

Spanish stress rules without the accent mark:

1. Words ending in a vowel, n, or s are stressed on the second-to-last syllable. Casa = CA-sa. Hablan = HA-blan. Libros = LI-bros.
2. Words ending in any other consonant are stressed on the last syllable. Hotel = ho-TEL. Doctor = doc-TOR. Mujer = mu-JER.

The accent mark appears on a vowel only when the natural stress falls somewhere those rules do not predict. Example: rule 1 would put the stress on the second-to-last syllable of "musica", giving "mu-SI-ca". But the actual word is música (MU-si-ca, stressed on the first syllable). The accent mark on the ú tells you that.

The other use of the accent mark is to distinguish between words that would otherwise be spelled identically:

• el (the) vs él (he)
• tu (your) vs tú (you)
• si (if) vs sí (yes)
• mas (but, archaic) vs más (more)
• te (you, object pronoun) vs té (tea)
• se (reflexive pronoun) vs sé (I know)
• mi (my) vs mí (me)

These distinguishing accents are required in proper writing; informal Spanish text frequently drops them.

The dieresis (two dots above the u: ü) appears only in güe and güi sequences, signalling that the u should be pronounced rather than silent. Most adult learners encounter it first in the words vergüenza (shame), pingüino (penguin), and antigüedad (antiquity).

K and W

Spanish historically had no native words with k or w. Both letters exist in the modern alphabet specifically for loanwords:

• K in kilo, karate, kayak, kilometro (also spelled with c: ciencia)
• W in whisky, web, wifi, water (toilet, in Spain), windsurfing

You will not see a k or a w in a traditional Spanish word with native roots. The Real Academia regularised the inclusion of both letters in the official alphabet in 2010, formalising what speakers were already doing with loanwords.

What used to be letters: ch and ll

Until 1994, Spanish school children learned a 29-letter alphabet that included ch (called "che") and ll (called "elle") as separate letters between c and d, and between l and m. The Real Academia removed them from the alphabet in stages between 1994 and 2010, on the grounds that they are digraphs (two letters representing one sound) rather than single letters.

The sounds they represent are still real:

• ch as in chocolate, mucho, noche. Identical to English "ch" in church.
• ll as in lluvia, llamar, calle. Pronounced "y" in most of the Spanish-speaking world (yeísmo), as a distinct "ly" sound in some Andean and rural varieties (lleísmo), and as the famous "sh" sound in Rioplatense Spanish (Buenos Aires, Montevideo).

If you have a Spanish dictionary printed before 1995 or so, words starting with ch and ll have their own sections; modern dictionaries file them under c and l. The change is purely alphabetic, not phonetic.

The English alphabet a learner already has

Most letters of the Spanish alphabet make sounds an English speaker already knows: a, b, d, f, l, m, n, p, s, t, k. The work for adult learners is concentrated in a handful of specific sounds:

1. The harsh j / g-before-e-or-i sound, which is stronger than English h.
2. The r, which is a single tap between vowels and a roll at the start of words; the rolled r in particular is the most-feared and most-overrated Spanish learning hurdle.
3. The ñ, which is straightforwardly "ny" once you accept that it is its own letter.
4. The c / z / s decision, which is regional and not a question of difficulty.
5. The five vowels, which are simpler than English vowels but require unlearning the diphthong-heavy English defaults.

Get those five right and you have functional Spanish pronunciation. The rest is just practice.

A note on stress and reading aloud

The single most powerful thing about the Spanish writing system is that you can read aloud any word, including ones you have never seen, by following two rules:

1. Each letter has one sound. The vowels never change, the consonants change only in the few regular cases above.
2. Stress is predictable: second-to-last syllable for words ending in vowel/n/s, last syllable otherwise, accent mark when the actual stress breaks that rule.

This is the opposite of English, where a literate adult can encounter a brand-new written word and have no idea how to say it (e.g. "ghoti" famously pronounced "fish" using English's irregularities). In Spanish, once you have the alphabet and the stress rules, you can read aloud the names of pharmaceuticals, place names you have never heard, and unfamiliar technical terms, and be right almost every time.

That is what makes Spanish one of the most readable major languages on Earth, and one of the best first second-languages an English speaker can choose.