The Spanish Alphabet

The Spanish alphabet is very similar to the English alphabet, but the nice thing about Spanish is that pronunciation and spelling are much more predictable.

The official Spanish alphabet, according to the Real Academia Española, includes the following letters: a, b, c, ch, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, and z.

There are some different opinions on this, though. Sometimes rr is considered a separate letter, and sometimes w and/or q aren’t included.

Anyway, you can listen to the Spanish name of each letter here or here.

Instead of making a long list of descriptions and rules for each letter, I thought I’d just link to an excellent (and free) Spanish Pronunciation Tutorial. It includes audio examples for every letter, and it even covers some other topics like intonation.

Now, if you’re completely new to Spanish, here’s my advice: don’t bother memorizing the names of all the letters. I had to memorize them in my Spanish class over four years ago, and nobody has ever asked me to spell something in Spanish! So, just listen to those audio clips and let the information soak in. You’ll always have time to memorize it later.