Spanish Alphabet

The Spanish alphabet

Why did I write about Spanish alphabet? As an English native speaker, I never imaged that there was actually a different character set of letters for people in Mexico and Spain for example.

I mean, I an American that just assumed the whole world spoke English and should use our alphabet or at least convert to it sometime. Can you believe that? That is what I thought when I was a kid. Now I live in Europe and teach languages. Of course I do not thing that way anymore.

Spanish alphabet

The alphabet of Madrid, Spain and Mexico city, Mexico is similar to other western European languages. If you are trying to learn Spanish I would recommend you start with the ABCs. If you learn the pronunciations and a few special characters, reading Spanish will be easier.

Letters and Spanish alphabet pronunciation

Spanish letters and orthography are basically the same as English. Look at some different characters such as the double L, or ‘LL’, ‘Ñ’ and ‘ch’.

A – a
B – be
C – ce
CH – che
D – de
E – e
F – efe
G – ge
H – hache
I – i
J – jota
K – ka
L – ele
LL – elle
M – eme
N – ene
Ñ – eñe
O – o
P – pe
Q – cu
R – ere
S – ese
T – te
U – u
V – ve
W – uve doble
X – equis
Y – i griega
Z – zeta

Interesting facts about Spanish alphabet’s letters and characters

It is interesting to note that the Spanish letters B and V have the same pronunciation. You know in Russian B is pronounced V. So I think this a pretty common thing among European alphabets, especially with a Mediterranean influences (Russian got their letters from the Greeks).

Spanish letters often have accents like ó or umlaut like ü. These characters are considered rather then separate letters of the Hispanic alphabet.

Now since there is gender, like in most Romantic languages, the Spain alphabet is female or feminine. That is la z or la y.

The most common letters are -> 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 in that order and vowels are about 45% of any speech or book in the Spanish language.

Spanish (español) is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group, an important different in the evolution of this language was the diphthongization of the Latin alphabet short vowels e and o into ie and ue, when they had stress on them.
K and w are only used with foreign import words.
¿ and ¡ are used to in question and to show emphasis.

Using Latino alphabet characters on your keyboard

Since I live in Poland I am quite use to toggling between various fonts of various European alphabets on my keyboard. Once you have Spanish set up on your keyboard it is easy to use, it will give you a little icon in the lower right hand corner of you screen.
Set up of Spanish keyboard:
If you go to->
start;
control panel
Double click Keyboard
Choose the Language tab.
Click add.
Then in the drop down menu you will see a choice for Spanish fonts and characters.

This way you can add Spanish characters and accents to your windows keyboard and you can use the Spanish Alfabeto en Español.

Here is a quality free online Spanish language website worth reading. It include grammar, a dictionary and lessons.

If you have any suggestions or information about Spanish alfabet please let me know.