Spanish spelling

Orthography of the Spanish language 2010 written by the RAE together with the ASALE.

The orthography of Spanish is the set of rules that regulate the writing of the language. The Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE), whose most prominent member is the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), are the institutions in charge of this, since they have described their mission as "promoting unity, integrity and development of the language"..

Spanish uses an extended variant of the Latin alphabet, which consists of 27 letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i >, j, k, l, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y and z. Likewise, five digraphs are also used to represent as many phonemes: ch, ll, rr, gu and what; These last two are considered as positional variants for the representation of the phonemes /g/ and /k/.

The digraphs ch and ll have specific phonetic values, so in the Ortografía de la lengua española of 1754 they began to be considered as letters of the Spanish alphabet, and from the publication of the fourth edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish language in 1803 they were arranged separately from c and l. At the X Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, held in Madrid in 1994, and on the recommendation of several organizations, it was agreed to rearrange the digraphs ch and ll in the place assigned to them by the universal Latin alphabet, although they were still part of the alphabet. With the publication of the Ortografía de la lengua española in 2010, both were officially no longer considered letters of the alphabet.

In addition, the vowels (a, e, i, o, u), and exceptionally the «y» when it is a vowel,^{[citation needed]} accept the acute accent or tilde (´) —remaining in á, é, í, ó, ú, ý— to indicate the stressed syllable; and the vowel u accepts the umlaut or cream (¨) which, in the syllables güe and güi, modifies it to indicate its sonority.

Developed in various stages starting from the Alfonsine period, the orthography was definitively standardized under the guidance of the Royal Spanish Academy, and has undergone few changes since the publication of Ortografía de la lengua española de 1854. The successive decisions have applied sometimes phonological and sometimes etymological criteria, giving rise to a hybrid and strongly conventional system. Although the correspondence between spelling and spoken language is predictable from writing (that is, a competent speaker is able to unequivocally determine the correct estimated pronunciation for almost any text), the reverse is not the case, with numerous letters representing graphically identical phonemes (the number of phonemes in Spanish typically ranges from 22 to 24, depending on the dialect ^{[citation required]}). Spell reform projects in search of a two-way correspondence (the first date from the XVII century) have been invariably rejected. The divergence of the phonology of the language among its various dialects makes it impossible today to elaborate a purely phonetic spelling that adequately reflects the variety of the language; most current proposals are limited to the simplification of homophone symbols, which are retained for etymological reasons.

Letters

The Spanish alphabet consists of 27 letters:

	Spanish grant. Spanish abecedary pronounced by a Spanish speaker.
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	Spanish subscriber. Abecedario del español pronunciado por un speakte de Hispanoamérica.
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In 1754, with the publication of the Ortografía de la lengua española of that same year, the digraphs ch and ll began to be considered as letters of the Spanish alphabet, and between 1803 and 1994 they received separate headings in dictionaries and when ordering words alphabetically. Never, however, were they considered strict units; When the orthography requires a capital initial, in the words that begin with one of these digraphs, only the first of the graphemes that compose it is capitalized. As of 2010, with the publication of the new Ortografía de la lengua española, the digraphs ch and ll are no longer considered letters of the Spanish alphabet, but they will continue to be used as up to now in the writing of Spanish words. The digraph rr, called double erre or double erre, was never considered a separate letter of the Spanish alphabet, probably because it never appeared in word initial position.

The w and the k appear only rarely in Spanish words and invariably indicate terms adopted by loan or cultism in the course of the last two centuries.

Nomenclature Variations

Several of the graphemes have more than one name. The b is known as be a secas, be alta (in Catalonia), be grande (in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Peru) or be long (in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay); for having represented in Latin the voiced bilabial consonant phoneme (which has as allophones the voiced bilabial plosive consonant [b] and the voiced bilabial fricative [β]), is sometimes called b labial in Colombia, although the pronunciation of the v is also labial and identical in the vast majority of dialects. In turn, the latter is known as uve (in Spain and Puerto Rico), ve, ve baja, ve chica (in Peru), ve pequeño (in Colombia and Venezuela) or ve corta (in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay); for the same sake of historical precision in some manuals it is designated as v dental, although the dental pronunciation disappeared centuries ago from the language system.

The letter w is called double u in Spain, double u in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic; It ve doubles in other Central American countries and some South American countries, such as Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay or Venezuela, and ves doble in others such as Peru.

Ll and rr are interchangeably designated as elle and double erre or as double ele and double err. They are one of the few consonants that appear duplicated in the current spelling, along with c and exceptionally n, and the only ones with distinctive pronunciations.

The i is sometimes called the Latin i to distinguish it from the Greek y, y (or i Greek). In some places, the name ye is preferred for the latter.

In the past, silk was sometimes used as a name for z, a practice now in disuse and discarded by the RAE.

Spelling 2010 proposes unifying letter names: choose be for b, i (not Latin i), vee for v, double vee for w, ye for y and zeta for z, and definitively discards the archaic names ere for the r i>, and ceta, ceda and zeda for the z.

Spelling regularity and irregularity

The claim that the spelling of Spanish is primarily phonographic (or phonetic) is widespread but erroneous. A phonographic orthography tends to respect the phonemic principle according to which the set of phonemes of a language and the set of letters with which it is written must correspond biunivocally, that is, for each letter there must be only one phoneme and for each phoneme there must be have only one letter. Although, indeed, in comparison with other European languages, the regularity of the phonetic principle is almost respected, there are a series of deviations from it that notably break with said regularity. Among these, the phenomena of polygraphy (different graphic representations for the same phoneme) and polyphony (different phonemes represented by the same letter) stand out.

• Pneuma polygraphy /k/: such a motto can be represented in 3 different forms (k, qu, c).
• Pneuma polygraphy /b/: such a motto can be represented in 3 different forms (b, v, w).
• Pneuma polygraphy /g/: Such a motto can be represented in 2 different forms (g, gu).
• Pneuma polygraphy /i/: such a motto can be represented in 2 different forms (i, y).
• Pneuma polygraphy /x/: such a motto can be represented in 3 different forms (g, j, x).
• Pneuma polygraphy /s/: such a motto can be represented in 3 different forms (s, c, z).
• Pneuma polygraphy /θ/: This seedling can be represented in 2 different forms (c, z), in non-seeding areas.
• Polyphony of the letter g: this letter represents 2 different phonemes (/x/, /g/).
• Polyphony of the letter c: this letter represents 2 different phonemes (/k/, /s/ or /θ/).
• Polyphony of the letter and: this letter represents 2 different phonemes (/i/, ///, in some theoretical schemes both phonemes are the same).
• Polyphony of the letter x: This letter represents 3 different phonemes (/k/+/s/, /s/, /x/).

To the existence of letters that have no correspondence with any phoneme (h, u silent), other antiphonographic divergences can also be added, among which it is worth mentioning heterography (different spelling) of uniform morphemes (I am born, you are born), the composition of phonograms (ch for /ʧ/ or ll for /ʎ/).

Polyphonies have their origin in etymological considerations that belong to the history of the language, thus giving rise to systematic difficulties in determining the correct use of b/v, h/g in initial position, c/s/z, g /j and ll/y and making numerous articulations, allophones or not, indistinguishable in the spelling. The h which currently does not represent any sound, but which acquires sonority when preceded by a c- (ch), must also be understood as an anomaly of etymological origin that makes it difficult to Spanish writing according to the current orthographic norms.

Considerations for implementing spelling changes

Spelling changes are mainly contributed by the literate classes, although they are frequently modifications by the speakers. The competent institutions and organizations sanction the respective spelling changes.

Reforms are changes made to a system of pre-existing spelling rules. Frequently they are small interventions: incorporation of new signs, elimination of obsolete spellings, addition of new rules for the use of the different orthographic signs...; which favors its acceptance. The purpose of such changes is to improve the internal coherence of the system to effectively fulfill its purpose.

The linguistic advantages of a deep reform are:

• Eliminate deviations from the principle of biunivocal correspondence between fonemas and graphemes,
• Facilitate orthographic correction.

The educational and social advantages are:

• To spend hours of study to improve oral and written expression,
• Facilitate learning, foreigners and speakers, avoiding excessive effort,
• Overcoming the social barrier.

The difficulties of a deep reform are:

• Resistance to change and lack of collaboration by literate speakers, educational systems or media; this prevents consensus for successful implementation.

The disadvantages of a deep reform are:

• Disfigure the visual identity,
• Prevent reading of previous writings or expenses to adapt them,
• Impossibility to represent dialectal differences, such as seo or yeism, without giving up graffiti.

History

Alfonsí period

During the first centuries of the development of Spanish, the rarity of the written language and its still imprecise description made a codification of its spelling unnecessary. The first attempt to provide a systematic graphic code dates from the reign of Alfonso X, who tried to adjust the various solutions adopted by his predecessors to a fundamentally phonographic criterion.

Alfonso X brought together a large number of scholars at his court, who set about preparing an encyclopedic compilation of the knowledge of the time, continuing and expanding the work of the Toledo school of translators. Romance was used as an intermediate language in translations from Arabic or Greek into Latin. The profusion of copies made in the royal scriptorium and the impact of translations on the corpus of the Romance language spread and gave force to the conventions established by the king.

Many of those that appear retrospectively as irregularities or inaccuracies in the Alphonse spelling are actually due to the notable difference that the phonological system of the time had compared to the current one. The coronal consonant system, for example, included four fricatives and two affricates, as opposed to the maximum three fricatives/affricates found in contemporary dialects: /d^z/ was written z as in dezir, /t^s/ was written ç as in março, /s/ was written s or ss between two vowels as in saber, missa, /z/ was written s as in osar, /ʃ/ was written x as in dixe and /ʒ/ was written j or i as in aguiiar/aguijar. The actual orthography attempted to reflect with remarkable fidelity the phonological properties of speech at the time. His invention was the doubling of N and later L to indicate the palatalization in /ɲ/ and /ʎ/, the first of which the copyists transformed into the abbreviation that would eventually give the eñe.

Other characteristics of the Alfonsí spelling are the variation in the spelling of the unstressed vowels, probably reflecting a still irregular phonetic value (for example, in the Mío Cid manuscript both «will» and «will» appear «will»), the inconsistency in the suppression of the final e (noche ~ noch) and the total absence of accents or accents, be it with diacritical or phonetic value.

Between the Alphonse copyists and the Academy

Rules of orthographia in the Castilian language (Antonio de Nebrija, 1517).

The appearance of the printing press and the consequent increase in the rate and volume of the appearance of written works ended up undoing the Alphonsine system, fixed only through convention and not codified in a systematic work. The constant lexical additions, some produced by the influence of neighboring languages and many others due to the flood of cultisms concocted by translators, writers and jurists, who increasingly used the vernacular language in their writings, raised questions of spelling that answered many times to etymological and historical criteria rather than to the close correspondence between phoneme and grapheme proposed by the Alfonsine work.

On the other hand, changes in the phonology of the language had affected this correspondence, and a good part of the Alphonsine decisions were already arbitrary for the readers of the time. Added to this the purism and traditionalist taste of the authors of the Golden Age, an important and widespread controversy took place, which lasted centuries, about what should be the guiding principles to establish the graphic criteria.

Elio Antonio de Nebrija, author of the first Grammar of the Spanish language, was also the first to publish some Orthographia Rules. These codified for the first time the principles that take pronunciation as the ordering criterion for writing, although on occasions he did not lack etymological reasoning in difficult cases. In any case, Nebrija's idea that language was an instrument of the Empire It also extended to the oral and sought to unify the pronunciation throughout the territory of the Crown of Castile in accordance with the prestigious Valladolid form, definitively abandoning the Burgos romance that had given rise to the first pre-Alfonsino writings.

In 1531 Alejo Venegas printed his Tractado de orthographia y accentos, which contains significant differences with that of Nebrija; supports, for example, the phonological opposition between b and v and the existence of the closed front rounded vowel /y/, the old Greek ypsilon. In 1609 an Ortographia castellana was printed in Mexico, the work of Mateo Alemán from Seville, even more radical than the previous ones with respect to the need to dispense with conventional signs and fix the orthography based on phonetics; for example, it eliminated the ph, which Nebrija had still maintained, and proposed different spellings for /r/ and /ɾ/. Similarly daring was the Art of the Castilian Spanish Language by Bartolomé Jiménez Patón, published in 1614.

The high point of the phonetic movement was given by the appearance in 1627 of the Arte de la lengua española kastellana by Gonzalo Correas, which had an expanded and corrected version in 1630, under the title New and perfect Kastellan spelling. As the spelling chosen for his title by Correas evidences, the movement for the exact transcription of the phonology got rid of any historical itch in Correas; proposed to fully distinguish /r/ and /ɾ/, as German had done, dispense with the confusing c and q, use gh for the phoneme /g/, remove silent elements in all consonant clusters and carried out without waste his purpose to develop exactly the symmetry between phonemes and graphemes. The rigor of his doctrine earned him the appreciation of some of his successors, such as Gregorio Mayans, and of the American reformers, although he made his work a curiosity for scholars, since it broke radically with the customs..

The founding of the Academy

After the Spanish Succession War, the accession of Felipe de Anjou to the throne under the name of Felipe V gave rise to a marked Frenchification of cultural institutions. Among them was the Royal Spanish Academy, founded in 1713 with the idea of establishing, in accordance with the systematic ideal of the time, the purity of the language.

The conception of the RAE became evident in its Dictionary of Authorities, published throughout the 1720s, in which good saying is collected from the the work of a well-selected canon of authors and scholars. Under the influence of Adrián Conink, the Dictionary of Authorities broke completely with the phonetic trend and recovered the principles that the Académie française had used to establish the French language: etymology and historical pronunciation. In this way, he restored the difference between b and v despite the fact that it had disappeared phonologically, he imposed Latinized spellings for the words of Greek origin ―th for etymological θ, rh for ρ, ps for ψ, ph for the φ―, recovered the silent h and fixed the spelling of the consonantal groups according to their origin.

For the first edition of the Orthographia española (1741), the criteria were already less clear. On that occasion, the Academy chose to keep the PH group, but simplified the remaining Hellenisms to their phonetic forms; In addition, he removed the /s/ initials from Latin, or replaced them with an e epenthetic, without observing greater regularity.

The decisions of the Academy provoked the general rejection of scholars, who considered it incoherent and anachronistic. Thus, Mayans wrote in 1745:

Tell me that when he puts some care he follows the new [Ortographia] of the Spanish Academy I do not understand it; because I was persuaded that the rules that the Academy has tried to give are impracticable. It is true that either the pronunciation or the origin of the voices must be followed. That the pronunciation must be followed for me is a demonstrative thing, because if in ninety-nine voices it follows and writes well in feeling of all, why not in the hundredth?

Letter to A. M. Burriel, January 16, 1745.

The 1754 edition advanced in this sense, eliminating the P of Hellenic origin in some consonant groups, suppressing the PH and introducing rules of accentuation. The influence of Correas and other authors was felt at that stage, although the etymologizing elements, such as the reduplication of S, were preserved, as well as the extraordinary, in the opinion of his contemporaries, the affirmation that the Spanish syllable varies in quantity as well. than Latin, or the doctrine that the H stood for an "aspirated" (presumably /h/) and that pronunciation that did not include it should be considered faulty. Despite the royal support, decisions in this sense meant that there was no shortage of those who were unaware of the RAE's claim to serve as the ultimate arbiter on linguistic issues; Mayans and Antonio Bordazar de Artazu (1671-1744) published orthographies, and reissued Nebrija's Rules…, simply considering that the academic prescriptions were equivalent to the doctrine of any other scholar, and they did not deprive themselves to criticize them publicly and privately.

The tendency to simplify continued, perhaps because of this opposition; in 1763 the doubled s was eliminated and the use of accents was prescribed, including the circumflex in the syllables that the Academy held long. In 1803 he included in the alphabet the ch and the ll with their own value and eliminated the etymological use of the first, while allowing the elision of liquid consonants in some triple groups inherited from Latin; the k was dropped from the alphabet on this occasion. In 1815, the use of the q was definitively ordered, allowing it only before e and i, the x was eliminated > as a fricative except in final position, and the use of Y was limited to its consonant value, except at the end of the word.

The second half of the century saw the progressive surrender of objectors and the acceptance of academic rules in Spain. The opposition did not take long to reissue, but this time from the other shore of the ocean.

American Reformers

As in the other institutions of the Crown, the Academy did not include Americans in its number, nor did it take into consideration the processes that the language experienced in contact with the linguistic diversity of the conquered lands. In this way, the American students of the language had to carry out their task outside of it and, sometimes, in open opposition.

In 1823, a writing by the Venezuelan Andrés Bello and the Colombian Juan García del Río came to light, entitled Indications on the convenience of simplifying orthography in America, published in London. Despite the fact that Bello recognized the good work of the Academy in ordering and simplifying the spelling of the language, he considered that the etymological limitations that it imposed on itself had disastrous effects on teaching on both shores of the Atlantic. Bello's thesis was based on the fact that the use of etymology as a linguistic criterion was idle, since reading and the use of the language in general are not linked to its historical knowledge, and, in view of the problems it produced, on the contrary. to rational use.

Bello promoted a simplification in two stages, to avoid the clash problems that Bartolomé Jiménez Patón and Gonzalo Correas had faced, and a redistribution of the syllabary in response to the reality of linguistic use. He proposed removing the ambiguous c and silent h, assigning g and y only one of their values, writing always rr to represent the vibrating consonant and devote a body of scholars to solving on the spot the difference between b and v (betacism).

Twenty years later, during his exile in Chile, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento formulated a not very different proposal. Unlike Bello, Sarmiento preferred to keep the c instead of the k and dispense with the v, the x and the z.

Although the proposals of Bello and Sarmiento were not fully embodied, aspects of both were adopted in a proposal made by the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Chile to the government of this country, which was finally adopted there, in Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Likewise, Bello's influence had been seen in the proposal for the Madrid Literary and Scientific Academy of Primary Education Teachers, which the previous year had adopted many of his principles. However, Isabel II put an end to this project on April 25, 1844 by imposing, by royal decree, compliance with the Academy through the Prontuario de ortografía de la lengua castellana, arranged by royal order for the use of public schools, by the Royal Spanish Academy, in accordance with the system adopted in the ninth edition of its Dictionary [sic].

The difference in uses lasted until 1927, when Chile, the last country to support the orthography of Bello, in force for more than eighty years there, promulgated on August 6 of that year, the restitution of the academic norms of the RAE in teaching and official documents as of October 12, 1927.

News

The result of the long divergence and the opposition raised in other frameworks to the RAE has been a relaxation of its criteria; the editions of the Diccionario and the Ortografía of the 1990s have finally recognized that certain pronunciations vary between Spain and America, have asserted the predominant status of lisping and yeísmo, and admitted the graphic recognition of the variations in the formation of diphthongs. Other actions have followed the opposite course, by recommending the spelling of the complete consonant group in the cultisms, after centuries of suppression. The omission of ch and ll from the alphabetical order dates from the same date.

At the First International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in Zacatecas (Mexico) in 1997, Gabriel García Márquez reissued the proposal of Bello, Correas and other precursors, defending the suppression of arbitrary spellings and advocating for the « retirement of spelling". The controversy provoked was widely disseminated by the press with proposals for and against, although the discussion rarely adopted properly linguistic criteria.

Phonetic values

A

Grapheme A represents a phoneme whose general realization is the open central unrounded vowel, [a̠]. Standard Spanish does not make a phonological distinction with other open vowels, so that in dialects influenced by other languages it can also be pronounced as a schwa, [ə] (Catalonia) or a [e] (Asturias), or another vowel similar. The word-final digraph -an can be made by nasalizing the vowel in [ã] in many dialect variants.^{[citation needed]}

B

Grapheme B has in all Spanish dialects at least two allophone realizations (three in some dialects). In all dialects it represents the non-nasal voiced labial phoneme /b/ which has different phonetic relationships depending on its position within a word. In absolute initial position (after a pause) or after nasal, it always corresponds to the voiced bilabial plosive, [b]; in medial position, the explosion does not occur ―the lips do not touch― and the articulation actually corresponds to a bilabial approximant [β̞].

Lenition in medial position is a phenomenon common to all the voiced phonemes of Spanish (which in positions that do not favor lenition have allophones of voiced plosives); similar phenomena take place in < d > and < g >; however, they are more pronounced in some dialects. Speakers of dialects who prefer a fricative or approximant realization find that in those dialects the distinction of voiced plosives from each other and from the voiced labiovelar approximant consonant, [w] ―the sound of < hu- > before vowel― vanishes. Poetic spelling usually represents it by replacing < b >, < d > or < hu- > by < g[ü] >, as in the poem:

- Did you see Coquena?
"I never saw him,
but yes my ointment—required the shepherd

(J.C. Give them, The legend of Coquena)

In the group <obs->, <abs->, present in cultisms of Latin origin, the <b> It is not normally pronounced (in many parts of Spain), although in some variants it is maintained: in Mexico or Catalonia it is pronounced as [p]. The alternative spelling without <b> is frequently admitted in the case of the group <-bs->, giving rise to doublets such as dark/obscuro. Although in the <abs-> the elision of the /b/ follows the same rules, the Academy does not accept the omission of the B in these cases.^{[citation required]}

The grapheme V has exactly the same phonetic value as B. The distinction is retained purely for etymological reasons. However, some speakers commit the hypercorrectness of pronouncing certain words with a [v] labiodental in formal or emphatic.^{[citation required]}

C

Grapheme C corresponds to two different phonemes, the so-called "hard" or velar (/k/) and the "soft" or dento-alveolar (/θ/ or /s/). The first value corresponds to its pronunciation against the vowels <a, o, u> and all the consonants; is identical to that represented by the letters K and Q.

The second value corresponds to one of the most variable articulations of the Spanish language. In medieval Spanish this phoneme was an affricate /ʦ/ that evolved differently in different regions. Throughout the center and north of the Iberian Peninsula <c> before <e, i> evolved to voiceless interdental fricative, [θ]; however, in most Spanish dialects this phoneme does not exist, giving rise to the phenomenon called lisp. The assimilation of this to the voiceless alveolar fricative consonant, [s], has been lost for centuries and the sound it has been assimilated to that of the spelling S. In turn, its pronunciation presents some differences between regions, with varied realizations: apical-alveolar, lamino-alveolar, apical-dental, etc.

Ch

The digraph Ch is no longer considered a letter nor is it part of the Spanish alphabet. It represents the voiceless postalveolar affricate consonant, /ʧ/; the digraphic representation is due to the evolution of the phoneme from the voiced velar plosive, /k/, by palatalization and assimilation. In some Andalusian, Northern Mexican or Chilean dialects (in the latter case, socially disapproved) it completely loses the plosion and is realized as the voiceless postalveolar fricative consonant, [ʃ].

Very long ago the digraph was used with the value of /k/ in words of Greek etymology, such as chimera (today chimera) or chloro (today chlorine), but this usage was definitively abandoned in the 18th century. In fact, the term archive was originally pronounced as archive, but due to spelling maintenance its pronunciation changed.

D

The grapheme D represents the phoneme /d/ which has two allophones in standard Spanish: [d] and [ð̞]. In absolute initial position (after a pause) or after nasal or lateral, it always corresponds to the voiced alveolar plosive consonant, [d] ; in medial position, plosion does not occur ―the tongue does not occlude the interdental flow― and the articulation actually corresponds to an approximant, [ð̞]. The latter is sometimes transcribed simply as [ð] (although it does not represent the same "weak& sound& #34; than the English TH digraph in they 'they').

Some dialects tend to retain [d] word-final, although its lenition to an authentic fricative [ð] (central Spain, Mexico) and in other dialects there is even complete elision, although sometimes this last pronunciation is considered not very educated and therefore depends a lot on the linguistic register.

E

The grapheme E normally represents the unrounded front middle vowel, [e̞]. In many American dialects it is realized as the unrounded front semi-open vowel, [ɛ]. In some dialect varieties in Andalusia there is a phonemic opposition between /e/ and /ɛ/ (he doesn't comee / you don't come es).

The Academy traditionally maintains that E never has a short value in Spanish and that, therefore, it forms a diphthong only with I and U. This is not true for all dialects of Spanish; worst, for example, is usually pronounced as a monosyllable. In others, the realizations in diphthong are closed, assimilating to the I.

F

The grapheme F invariably represents the voiceless labiodental fricative consonant, /f/. The archaic use of PH for this phoneme in words of Greek origin was abandoned after the Ortografía of 1754 of the RAE.

In some rural dialects of Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico and southeastern Spain, initial or medial F tends to be realized as a palatal [ç], assimilating to J:

Five hundred together
He shall bear the one that is left behind;
We'll make him beep from the juerte;
rather be given by dijunct

(José Hernández, Martin Fierrovs. 393-396)

G

The grapheme G shares with C the duality of values depending on whether the following grapheme is A, O, U or E, I. The so-called "hard" is the voiceless velar fricative consonant, /x/, the same sound as J; in dialects that soften the latter into a voiceless glottal fricative consonant, /h/, the G is also softened. It corresponds to its pronunciation in front of the vowels E and I.

The so-called "soft" is the voiced velar plosive consonant, /g/; in middle position, in all Spanish dialects it undergoes lenition and becomes a velar approximant consonant, [ɰ] (in the section corresponding to B the confusions to which this lenition can give rise in some cases are explained). It corresponds to its pronunciation in front of the vowels A, O and U and the consonants.

To represent the sequences [ge], [gi], [ɰe] and [ɰi] uses the insertion of a silent U between the G and the corresponding vowel. Thus, guerra corresponds to the pronunciation ['ge.ra], and followed by [se.'ɰi.ð̞o].

In turn, for the sequences [gwe], [gwi], [ɣ̞we] and [ɣ̞wi], a diacritical mark is used, the diaeresis or cream, placed over the U; This is the case, for example, of penguin, which represents [piŋ.'ɣ̞ wi.no]. Many dialects elide the [g] or [ɣ̞] of these sequences. At a graphic level, the omission of the umlaut is one of the most frequent graphic errors among Spanish-speakers. In Spanish, the sound of [ɣ̞] is different from [ɰ] which is even more open. The second articulation occurs in Iberian Spanish in forms such as juego, fuego, luego that are pronounced as: [χwe̞ɰo], [fwe̞ɰo], [lwe̞ɰo],.

In some loanwords from English, the sequence -NG in final position ―which does not appear in other terms in Spanish― is realized as [ŋ].

H

The grapheme H is still used in standard Spanish purely for etymological or historical reasons, since in standard Spanish it has no phonic value (it is silent). However, dialectally in areas of Andalusia and Extremadura it continues to represent the /h/ sound of medieval Spanish. Most of the H's in Spanish most often come from the place where there was an F in Latin (as in hijo, from Latin filius) or a ḥāʼ (ح) Arabic (as in alcohol), which in medieval Spanish continued to be articulated as /h/. Rarely in words of Arabic origin it is realized as a glottal plosive consonant, momentarily stopping the phonation. In some modern loanwords, especially from English, it acquires the value of a voiceless glottal fricative consonant, which it has in the phonetics of the language of origin, or is assimilated to the voiceless velar fricative represented by G or J; thus, hamster is realized as [ 'ham.steɾ] or ['xam.steɾ], no ['am.steɾ].

In addition to its etymological use, H is used systematically prefixing the spellings IE, UE in word-initial position; in this case, the short vowels normally represented by I and U are almost without exception transformed into their consonantal equivalents, the palatal approximant, [j], and the labiovelar approximant, [w]. In dialects in which the voiced stops are replaced medially by the corresponding approximants, the latter pronunciation is virtually identical to that of G; see explanation in section B. Other dialects do not support [w] in initial position, and add an [g] epenthetic or velar reinforcement.

It was also used at the beginning of the written language to differentiate the U from the V, of similar spelling, at the beginning of the word. Thus, "bone" and other words that transformed the Latin initial long O into the diphthong UE are written with H, in order to distinguish them from other terms in VE.

I

The grapheme I represents the unrounded front close vowel, [i], or its allophone in initial position, the semivowel, [j]. Its vowel value is identical to that of Y in front of a consonant or in final position in all Spanish dialects; the difference in use is not etymological, but systematic. The Y was fixed as the standard form in the final position and the I for the rest in the 1815 edition of the Ortografía of the RAE; prior to this, the vacillations were numerous. The spellings rei or i, for example, were frequent instead of the modern spellings rey and y.

In some dialects, such as Northern Castilian, the <i> initial position in words like grass, hyena, or iron is also pronounced as a palatal approximant.

J

The grapheme J always represents a fricative consonant articulated in the posterior region of the speech apparatus, but its precise articulation varies enormously between dialects. The pronunciation consecrated as standard traditionally corresponds to the voiceless velar fricative consonant, [x], but this is scarce outside from Spain and the Southern Cone; in many American dialects it is realized as a palatal, [ç], or as a glottal, /h/.

The homophony between GE, GI and JE, JI is a frequent cause of spelling errors and has led to to the repeated proposal to suppress the first spelling; the systems of Andrés Bello, Domingo F. Sarmiento and the Madrid Literary and Scientific Academy of Primary Education Teachers eliminated the first in favor of the second. Juan Ramón Jiménez did the same in the editions of his works. The distinction is preserved with etymological criteria and has given rise to multiple historical inconsistencies; Until recently, the Academy recommended the spelling muger.

In some, few, cases, the J alternates with the X considered homophone, both forms being considered correct. This is the case of Mexico (Mexico), Texas (Texas) or Don Quixote (Quijote) of La Mancha. The pronunciation corresponds to the fricative used for J, not the normal one for X.

In some loanwords from English and French, J is used with its original value, usually the voiced postalveolar fricative consonant, [ʤ]; the most common example is jazz.

K

The grapheme K corresponds to the voiceless velar plosive consonant, /k/, the same sound represented by the C before A, O, U or consonant, and by the group QU. It was not used in Antonio de Nebrija's Reglas de Ortografía and hesitations regarding its use were numerous at the stage of the first fixation of the Spanish spelling. The unpublished Abecé Español by Gregorio Mayans described it as a "strange and superfluous letter", although he defended its use for foreign names. The RAE suppressed the use of this letter in 1815, although it admitted it again in 1869. In the vast majority of the words that use it there is an accepted alternative spelling with QU.

Due to the greater regularity of its use ―since its pronunciation does not vary according to the subsequent vowel, and it does not require a silent U―, many of the simplification projects promoted it as the only expression graph of the sound /k/. Today it is a distinctive feature of the short spelling used in electronic communication and of the jargon okupa and of young sectors of anarchism.

L

The grapheme L corresponds prototypically to the lateral alveolar approximant consonant, /l/, although there are dental allophones or postalveolar.

Ill

The digraph Ll is no longer considered a letter nor is it part of the Spanish alphabet. It represents, in the articulation considered standard by the Academy, the palatal lateral approximant consonant, /ʎ/. However, the phenomenon of yeísmo is widespread, which affects the majority of spoken dialects, causing its articulation to have merged with that of the palatal approximant phoneme /ʝ/. This sound in turn presents quite a bit of variation between the dialects of Spanish. Of unclear origin, yeísmo is today the dominant trend in Spanish pronunciation and, in fact, /ʎ/ is preserved mainly where the coexistence with another phonological system ―such as that of Catalan or Quechua and Aymara― preserves the awareness of the opposition. Curiously, in part of Galicia (mainly in the provinces of La Coruña and Pontevedra), where there is coexistence with the Galician phonological system, which traditionally presents /ʎ/ but lacks /ʝ/, a curious shape is given of yeísmo in which both phonemes are replaced by the voiced palatal stop phoneme (/ɟ/); for some reason such substitution, despite being common by speakers in both leagues, is only officially recognized by some linguists and exclusively in the Galician field, being a fact unknown to the majority of the population.

In River Plate Spanish it has shifted to a postalveolar pronunciation. In general, the pronunciation is voiced (called zheísmo or rehilamiento), [ʒ] or [dʒ], similar to that represented by the spelling j in French or Portuguese; in some sociolects (very markedly in Buenos Aires) the voiceless [ʃ] (called " sheísmo"), similar to that represented by the spelling sh in English, a unique phenomenon in Spanish usage.

In some loanwords from English, such as hall, where the grapheme represents a velarized allophone of [l], has the value of that one; the yeista pronunciation is considered inappropriate in these cases.

M

The grapheme M represents the bilabial nasal consonant, /m/; has a labiodental allophone ([ɱ]) vs. /f/. Regardless of the strict form of its realization, the spelling imposes its use against B, while N is used against the homophone V; the distinction dates back to the Alphonsine period, when the opposition between bilabial and labiodental still existed. The M is also always used before P.

The M in Spanish is not duplicated except in the names Emma and Emmanuel and some words of foreign origin such as emmental or gamma.

N

The grapheme N represents the alveolar nasal consonant, /n/, or its velar allophone, /ŋ/, when it precedes a posterior articulation consonant. The spelling NV does not follow this rule, which actually corresponds to [mb]; its distinction with MB dates back to the Alphonsine period, when the opposition between bilabial and labiodental still existed.

In final position, the sequence vowel + N is realized in some dialects by nasalizing the preceding vowel.

Ñ

The grapheme Ñ (which is also used in Galician, Filipino, Wolof, Breton and several Amerindian languages), represents the palatal nasal consonant, /ɲ/. Found mostly as a result of the evolution of Latin NN (as in año, caña, leño), Its graphic form derives from the abbreviated spelling of the copyists, who represented the two superimposed N's. In Spanish it exists only in initial or medial position; the few words that for etymological reasons should take it to the end of the word ―the case of disdain, of disdain― phonetically and graphically replace it with N.

In some American dialects, especially in Mexico City and the Río de la Plata, it is realized as a palatalized alveolar nasal consonant /nʲ/; the articulatory difference concerns the position of the apex of the tongue, which in [ɲ] does not have an articulatory function, while in [nʲ] it makes contact with the alveolus as the dome rises towards the palate.

OR

The grapheme O represents the rounded back mid vowel, /o̞/. It is more open than the /o/ found in most Indo-European languages, but still phonetically distinctive with respect to the semi-open back rounded vowel, [ɔ], which does not appear in most dialects of Spanish.

The Academy traditionally does not recognize the possibility that the O is short in Spanish and, therefore, does not consider that OE, EO, OA and AO may constitute diphthongs. In several dialects and, above all, in the more formal pronunciation, the hiatus is broken by inserting a voiceless glottal plosive consonant, [ʔ ], which does not exist as a phoneme in Spanish; in others it becomes a rounded back close vowel, /u/.

P

The grapheme P represents the voiceless bilabial plosive consonant, /p/. In many dialects /p/ undergoes lenition or assimilation before another consonant and there is still the possibility of its deletion, although that realization is sometimes considered uncultured. In initial position it is normally mute in cultisms of Greek origin, such as pneuma or psychology; in fact, the Ortografía of 1741 eliminated it from the groups PT and PS, preserved until then with etymological intentions. However, and contrary to the more widespread pronunciation, they have been restored to the spelling, admitting both alternatives; the Ortografía of 1999 recommends the use of the forms with P.

Q

The grapheme Q appears in Spanish only in the sequence QU, with the value of the voiceless velar plosive consonant, /k/, and only before E and I. It is used as a substitute for C in front of these letters, due to its variable pronunciation. Until the end of the XVIII century it was used with etymological criteria for words that used it in Latin, such as quando or quasi; of them some cultism is preserved, such as quorum, but it has disappeared in the majority, and in fact it is normative to replace it with the corresponding Hispanic letter (For example, "cuórum" instead of "quorum").

Some word of foreign origin, particularly Semitic, adopts it to transcribe the deaf uvular plosive consonant, /q/, represented in Arabic as ﻕ; however, the Academy advises against these spellings as foreign, such as Iraq or burqa, preferring the use of the equally foreign K to give Irak or burqa.

R

The grapheme R in Spanish has two clearly different values. Between vowels, and in some other positions, represents the simple alveolar trill, /ɾ/; at the beginning of a word and following a nasal consonant, the alveolar trill consonant, /r/. In many dialects, in final position it also takes on this last value.

The rules for determining the exact value are not simple and combine systematic and etymological criteria. The pronunciation /r/ systematically corresponds to R in initial position (branch, Roque) or postnasal (Enrique, inri) or to RR in any position (perro, guitar); For etymological reasons, the spelling R is also used following a prefix of Latin origin, as in alrededor or underline. In these cases, there is an alternative pronunciation with /ɾ/, relatively rare.

The digraph RH was preserved with etymological value for words of Greek origin until the 18th century, but was dropped at the time of PH. Mayans' Abecé gave it the value of a vibrant aspirate [rʰ], but most sources do not include this pronunciation at any stage of Spanish.

RR

The digraph rr represents a multiple alveolar trill in Spanish, Catalan, and Albanian orthographies. Its name is double erre or double erre, in order to differentiate it from the letter R (erre ), which usually represents the simple alveolar trill, although it can also represent the multiple consonant at the beginning of a word. It has never been treated as a letter of the Spanish alphabet, probably because it does not appear written in the initial position, although it is considered a letter in Albanian.

Yes

The grapheme S archetypically represents the voiceless alveolar fricative consonant, /s/, although there are several different realizations for the phoneme; in most American dialects it is lamino-alveolar or dental ([s]), while in Spain is normally apico-alveolar ([s̺]), a sound that speakers of other dialects often confuse with [ʃ].

In most of Central America, most of South America, and the southern half of Spain, syllable-final S is elided or aspirated as a voiceless glottal fricative consonant /h/; this pronunciation is considered in some areas little educated or neglected and the acrolectal forms highlight the sibilants, but it is common in everyday speech. In Eastern Andalusia and the Region of Murcia the elision of the S is compensated by opening (relaxing) the nuclear vowel of the syllable.

Due to lisping, in most of America the digraph SC before E or I simply represents a /s/.

The digraph SH exists in some loanwords, such as flash or geisha, or regionalisms such as cafishio. The Academy admits the use of such foreign words, highlighting them as such with typographical highlighting, but recommending adapting the terms both in spelling and pronunciation with an S (flas, gueisa ). It is usually realized as [ʃ], with a variant [s̺] in Spain for the final position.

AND

The grapheme T represents the voiceless alveolar plosive consonant, [t]; its realization is sometimes dental, [t̪].

The digraph TH, used to represent the [tʰ] inherited from the Greek theta, was abandoned in the 18th century and survives today only in very few cultisms.

The double T can be written with one grapheme for each letter or one for both letters, both ways are acceptable.

U

The grapheme U represents the closed back rounded vowel, /u/; has a labiovelar approximant allophone [w] before other vowels. It is silent after Q, with some exceptions such as quorum, and after G and before E or I; use the diaeresis if you want to make it sound in front of G. In certain initial diphthongs such as hueco or huevo it has velar reinforcement: AFI: [ˈgweko] and AFI: [ˈgweβ̞o]. In addition, it is the least used vowel of all.

V

The grapheme V has the same allophone realizations as B, which has exactly the same phonetic value as B. In some regions of Mexico^{[which one?]} and South America where in the latter region Spanish coexists with Guarani, due to its influence (where the labiodental pronunciation is predominant) the hypercorrection of pronouncing as /v/ is observed.^{[citation needed]} The distinction is generally retained purely for etymological reasons. V is always used after N.

W

The grapheme W is not typical of Spanish, and is used only in a handful of loanwords and foreign names. Depending on the origin of the term, the pronunciation used is [b]~[β̞] (if the word is from German origin [as in wolfram]) or [u] (if the word is of English origin [as in whisky]).

Most of the words with W also have hispanicized forms; thus, the Academy admits wolframium and whiskey. Some proper nouns from German such as Wagner (/bágner/) or Volkswagen (/bolksbágen/) ―where w represents the sound [v]― have been adapted to Spanish with [b] or [β̞].

X

The grapheme X normally represents the consonantal sequence [ks]; before a consonant, most dialects tend to suppress the plosion and reduce it to [s] or aspiration, although in In various Spanish-speaking countries, this pronunciation is often considered uncultivated.

Until the middle of the XIX century it was used with the value of [x] (sound of the j of current standard Spanish), imitating the Greek χ; the advisability of this practice was the cause of arduous debates among earlier grammarians, and the Academy retained it until 1815. Discouraged from that date on, it was retained, however, in a few terms ―box (/bój /), carcax (/karkáj/)―, until its disappearance in 1844. Today it is used only in place names and anthroponyms of Nahuatl origin, such as Mexico (/méjiko/) or Oaxaca (/guajáka/), alternating with a spelling with J considered equivalent. In Mexican Spanish X can represent four realizations [x] (in the oldest and most integrated Nahuatlisms), [ʃ] (in some Nahuas place names), in addition to the realizations [ks] and [s] from standard Spanish.

The lisp causes the group XC to have different values in America, the Canary Islands and part of Andalusia, where it is [ks] in formal language, and northern Spain, where it is almost always [sθ ]. There are also the pronunciations [s] and [θ].

In certain loanwords of Portuguese, Galician or Catalan origin, as well as in place names and words of Mesoamerican origin, the X has the value of [ʃ].

AND

The grapheme Y has the value of a consonant between vowels, at the beginning of a word or after a nasal, and as a semivowel after a vowel.

The realization of the first varies according to the dialects. In much of America and Spain the voiced palatal fricative consonant is used ([ʝ]), while in Río de la Plata moves to postalveolar position ([ʒ]) and sometimes deafens into [ʃ]. It has allophones: the palatal affricate, [ɟ͠ʝ], or the postalveolar, [ʤ], after nasal consonant or in initial position. In certain areas of Galicia, both the Y and the LL acquire a voiced palatal plosive pronunciation ([ɟ]).

In final position it has the value of a palatal approximant consonant [j] and in the conjunction y can sound the same way or like the vowel [i]. Its use was fixed systematically in 1815; in pre-academic spelling it was used loosely as a substitute for I. Several toponymic and anthroponymic doublets remain from this use, such as Ybarra/Ibarra.

In current Spanish, this is the only consonant that can be stressed, as long as it corresponds to the vowel phoneme [i], and there is a hiatus. This phenomenon only occurs in archaic spellings such as Aýna (municipality of Spain), and in proper and uncommon names such as Laýna, and Ýscar. These examples are exceptions in terms of the accentuation of the "y", which are kept that way for purely etymological reasons, since they are archaic spellings that despite the reforms that the RAE has made to the orthography of the Spanish, these have survived over time.

Z

The grapheme Z has the same value as soft C in the corresponding dialect, that is, the voiceless dental fricative consonant, [θ], in northern and central Spain and the voiceless alveolar fricative consonant, [s], in the rest of the dialects.

Frequency of the use of letters

The frequency of use of the letters in Spanish is as follows:^{[required appointment]}

Spelling rules

Capitalization

The rules regarding the use of capital letters in Spanish have undergone notable variations over the years. Although today it is generally reserved for proper names, there are numerous exceptions and the style manuals of the different media are contradictory to each other and to the Academy's prescriptions. Capital letters continue to be commonly used for academic disciplines and for noble or honorary titles when they are used pronominally; in most of the remaining cases there is a trend towards its suppression.

Accentuation

After the abandonment of the circumflex accent (^) in the XIX century, Spanish used exclusively the acute accent as a diacritic (´), which is placed over the central vowel of a syllable to indicate that it is stressed in some cases.

The criteria used are based on a knowledge of the usual correct pronunciation, without which the spelling rules would be meaningless since their application would be impossible and the writing must adapt to the pronunciation and not the other way around as is usually believed. Thus, different types of words are distinguished for the use of accents.

Oxytone words (traditionally called «agudas») are graphically accented if they end in a vowel, in N or in S, thus the pronunciation falls on the last syllable; conversely, paroxytones (traditionally «grave» or «flat») are accented if they end in a consonant, except when they end in N or S (unless the S is preceded by a consonant, for example: biceps). All proparoxytones ("esdrújulas" and "sobresdrújulas") have a graphic accent, with the exception of adverbs in -mente derived from an adjective that does not have it in its base form.

The accent is also used on the weak vowel (I or U) of a diphthong to signal its break (país), the use that was traditionally reserved for the diaeresis and with which it is still used in poetic spelling. The exception is the diphthong UI, which is not considered a hiatus even if it is accented according to the preceding rules.

A good number of monosyllables, especially adverbs and conjunctions, carry a purely diacritical accent to distinguish them from their homographs; thus, tu is the second person possessive adjective, while tú is the personal pronoun. In several cases the diacritic accent has been suppressed in the latest editions of the Ortografía. It is also used to distinguish between interrogatives and relatives (where and donde).

It is a common mistake to consider that capital letters do not have a tilde. An example is the Argentine newspaper La Nación, in which this is missing from the title on the first page.

On this and other cases, the RAE published the following in 1999:

The capitals carry a tilde if they correspond to the given rules. The Academy has never established a rule in the opposite direction.

Royal Spanish Academy

In this sense, the Spanish newspaper El País modified its header in 2007 so that «EL PAÍS» began to be written with an accent.

Other diacritical marks

The diaeresis or cream (¨) is used to indicate that the U written after a G is pronounced. In poetry it is sometimes used to force a hiatus in the scansion of a syllable that normally makes up a diphthong, in which case it can fall on both the I and the U, viz:

I woke up the day,
and his dawn first,
with its thousand ruïdos
I was waking up the town.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rima 73

Proper use of: h, g, j, ll, y, r, rr, b, v, c, s, z

This section contains a number of recurring patterns, which although they may have marginal exceptions are a reasonable guide to spelling.

Spelling marks

In written texts —which are the set of coherent statements embodied on any handwritten, typed or printed graphic medium—, orthographic signs are all those graphic marks that are not classified as letters or numbers.

The main objective of writing is the communication (through the conservation of it) of some idea or message. The proper use of orthographic signs contributes to this objective, since they achieve that the idea or message is correctly captured: clearly and without possible ambiguity, and therefore, cause its reading to be indicated.

Each orthographic sign has its own function within a written text. Although in some cases the use of some orthographic sign or the absence of it may fall on the writing style of the author, currently there are uses of some orthographic signs in specific circumstances that are mandatory by convention among Spanish-speakers.

They can be classified into two groups: punctuation marks and auxiliary signs. The number —and in some cases, their classification— of the orthographic signs existing in Spanish may vary. However, according to the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas (2005) there are a total of eleven punctuation marks: comma, period, semicolon, ellipsis, colon, question marks, exclamation marks, brackets, parentheses, quotation marks, and underscores; and there are a total of eight auxiliary signs: tilde, apostrophe, asterisk, slash, umlaut, hyphen, brace, and paragraph sign.

Punctuation Marks

Spanish is exceptional in indicating the beginning of an interrogative or exclamatory sentence with an inverted variant of the sign used in final position (¿, ¡), a use that spread from the 18th century.

This is a logical peculiarity, since many interrogative and exclamatory sentences, unlike other languages, are –in their written form– identical to affirmative ones. This makes reading easier.^{[citation required]} On the other hand, the question and exclamation marks allow us to indicate the beginning and end of an interrogative or exclamatory expression within a sentence, p. eg: We leave at five, right? I'm sick of it, damn it! How!? If –as in the previous examples– the question mark or exclamation mark appears at the end of the sentence, a point is no longer written after them because these signs already function as a point of the sentence.

Spelling of the RAE

The Ortografía de la lengua española (a work often referred to by the acronym OLE) corresponds to the normative compilation of the orthography of the Spanish language. It has been edited and prepared by the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) since its first edition in 1741, when it was published as Orthographía española, and since 1999 it has been carried out jointly with the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language. The most recent edition is that of the year 2010.

With the publication of the Prontuario de ortografía de la lengua castellana, arranged in royal order for the use of public schools, by the Royal Spanish Academy, in accordance with the system adopted in the ninth edition of its Dictionary [sic] (1844), the RAE agreements regarding spelling reached the level of regulations, displacing other possible spelling manuals, mainly that of Andrés Bello (see Bello's spelling).

The director of the Mexican Academy of Language, José G. Moreno de Alba, announced on Sunday, November 28, 2010 in Guadalajara (Mexico) the agreement of the twenty-two Academies of the Spanish language on the new edition of the Spelling, which was published in December 2010.

Regarding the changes introduced by the RAE in December 2010, see the article Innovations in Spanish orthography (2010).