The Spanish Alphabet – El abecedario o alfabeto

You can easily learn it in Spanish if you know the alphabet in English.
That is because the Spanish alphabet is very similar to the alphabets of most other western European languages, including English. According to the Real Academia Española, which is considered the arbiter of what’s official Spanish, the following letters make up the Spanish alphabet:

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, ll, m, n, ñ, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z

This chart shows the capital letters along with name of each letter.

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: doble ve
X: equis
Y: y griega
Z: zeta

Which letters make up the alphabet?
W (sometimes referred to as doble ve) and K, which exist almost exclusively in words of foreign origin, such as kilómetro, kiosko. And some lists count RR (erre), which isn’t pronounced the same as R.

It used to be that dictionaries would ch after c. But in modern dictionaries, the words are alphabetized as they would be in English (except that the Ñ comes after the N).

The letters B and V have exactly the same pronunciation, and their names are pronounced exactly alike. Sometimes B is referred to as be larga (“long B”) and the V as uve or ve corta (“short V”).

You will find as you learn Spanish that vowels are often written with accents, as in corazón, César, and the U is sometimes topped with a dieresis or umlaut, as in antigüedad, agüita.

However, vowels with such diacritical marks are not considered separate letters (as they can be in some other languages).

Please, note that the letters of the alphabet are feminine: la a, “the ‘a'”; la b, “the ‘b.'”

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