Spanish Alphabet Sounds - Lingua Linkup (2023)

FAQs

What letters sounds exactly the same in the Spanish alphabet? ›

The sound [b] and the letters Be (B) and Uve (V) The letters B and V are pronounced the same in any position. This surprises many students, but you don't have to worry… the sound of B and V is the same for all Spanish speakers.

Pronunciation 1: LL Sounds Like The English Letter 'Y'

Simply magine replacing any ll with a 'y' and that's it! For example, you would pronounce lluvia (rain) as “yuvia” or se llama as “se yama”. Here are some other common ll words and their pronunciations: llave (key) – yave.

Key Takeaways. In standard Spanish, the b and v are identical in terms of pronunciation. The b and v are pronounced somewhat like a soft version the English "b" after a pause and after the m sound. In other situations, the b and v are pronounced somewhat like the English v but with the lips touching each other.

In the Caribbean and Central America, the jota has a softer sound. This softer J is much easier for new Spanish learners because it's closer to the H sound in English. It sounds like the H in “hand”, but more in the back of your mouth (and also a bit longer).

But in 1994, the Spanish Royal Academy eliminated the LL and CH from the Spanish language alphabet. They made this change to make Spanish more computer and keyboard friendly. This change also streamlines the Spanish alphabet. After all, it's two less letters!

In 2010, the Royal Spanish Academy officially removed two letters (ch and ll) from the alphabet, making it 27 letters instead of 29. Fortunately for English speakers, the official Spanish alphabet now only has the one additional letter that does not appear in the English alphabet: ñ.

The letter h is always silent in Spanish, wherever it is in a word. The only exception is when you find it together with the letter c. The ch sound is pronounced as it is in English.

Only the single letter f is used to make the f sound in Spanish. The Spanish never use ph to produce the f sound, and the letter p is always pronounced like the p in “papa.” If the English word has ph or a double f, the Spanish cognate will always use one f; for example, fotografía, físico, and terrífico.

The story goes like this: a medieval king of Spain spoke with a lisp. Wanting to imitate royalty, courtiers picked it up. The resulting th sound wormed its way into the Spanish language.

Do Mexicans pronounce ll as j? ›

In Spain, LL is pronounced more or less like an English J. In llámame (call me) it sounds similar to the J in “jump.” We also pronounce Y at the beginning of a word the same way, as in yema (yolk). In most of Latin America, however, folks take the double-L a little easier and pronounce it like the Y in “yes.”

Hello and Thank You for this Public Service Announcement! As a Spanish speaking Puerto Rican 🇵🇷with an undetectable accent, I must confirm I pronounce my name in Spanish. Y sounds like a J. So indeed you may call me “JamJam” as you write YamYam.

The way we call the letter "W" in Spanish can be so confusing for Spanish learners and even for native Spanish speakers from different countries! Because the same letter has different names ("doble u", "doble ve" or "uve doble") and all of them are correct!

There used to be a /v/ sound in Spanish, pronounced by vibrating the lower lip and the upper teeth, as in English. Then, because it is less complicated to press the two lips together, /v/ was levelled to /b/. It's a much softer /b/ than in English, because the lips vibrate and don't “pop”.

The Mexican chilli pepper often catches us Brits out. We tend to pronounce Jalapeno as 'Hala-pen-yo. ' The correct pronunciation is 'Hah-lah-pain-yoh.

B and V do have the same sound in Spanish. But what you might not realise is that there are actually two different sounds Spanish speakers make when they pronounce a B or V depending on the word and context.

Germanic and Eastern-European languages

The great majority of Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, use ⟨j⟩ for the palatal approximant /j/, which is usually represented by the letter ⟨y⟩ in English.

The Spanish Alphabet: Sounds And Letters

The table above includes the four extra letters that are often included in the Spanish alphabet: ch, ll, ñ and rr.

One R makes a short sound similar to “D” or “T” in English. Two “R”s together (“RR”) makes a longer sound called a trill! Here are some tips to practice each sound alone and with your child!

C, R, L, and N

And the trick is just to remember the exceptions. To do that, all you need to remember is CAROLINE. The consonants in CAROLINE ('c', 'r', 'l', 'n') are the only consonants that are doubled-up in Spanish.

What is the least used letter in Spanish? ›

The most commonly used letter in Spanish is the “e”. This is followed by the “a” and, in third place, also a vowel, the “o”. The consonants 's' and 'r' complete the top five. At the other end of the scale are 'x', 'k' and 'w', which are the least used.

Spanish alphabet: Writing system and pronunciation

In addition to the 27 letters present in the Spanish alphabet, there are five graphics, or combinations of letters, that serve other sounds. These are "ch", "ll", "rr", "gu", and "qu".

Ch is traditionally considered a distinct letter of the Spanish alphabet, called che. In the 2010 Orthography of the Spanish Language, Ch is no longer considered a letter of its own but rather a digraph consisting of two letters.

Fun Fact: The letter "w" is the least used letter in Spanish. So how many letters are there? Officially there are 27, but you may find answers anywhere between 25 ("ñ," but no "k" or "w") and 30 (the 26 you're used to plus "ch," "ll," "ñ," and "rr.") Just to cover all the bases let's work with a 30-letter alphabet.

People of Madrid, and most parts of Spain, pronounce the letters z and c (when before an e or i) different from people in Latin America. This difference in pronunciation is what's called the “Spanish lisp.”

Rule number nine, if a word ends in a "z," it's probably feminine. Some common examples are la cruz, la faz, la luz, la paz, la rigidez, la vejez, la vez, and la voz. But some exceptions are masculine, el arroz, el haz, el lapiz, el matiz, and el pez.

The letter H:

In Spanish, the letter H is not pronounced, but it is essential to write the words with the H otherwise you will make a lot of spelling mistakes. For foreigners, the letter H is one of the most difficult to learn, since you need to learn to NOT pronounce it.

If the h is silent, why does it exist? For reasons of etymology (word history) only. Just as the "k" in the English "know" and the "b" in "lamb" used to be audible, the Spanish h used to be pronounced ages ago. Almost all Spanish consonants have become softer over the years; the h became so soft as to become inaudible.

The letter H existed in the Latin alphabet, from which both the Spanish and the English alphabets derive. In early Latin it represented the same sound as that of the letter h in English words like house.

"Philippines" is anglicized, while "Filipino" is probably in Spanish (Spain colonized the Philippines). Because that's the proper spelling in the country's language. Philippines is an Americanized spelling.

Why did Spanish replace f with H? ›

Summarizing his theory, he argues that the Basques and Cantabri, and presumably also the Iberians, whose languages lacked the sound [f], were replacing it with an aspiration in [h] which, acoustically, was the closest sound.

There are five Spanish vowels: a, e, i, o, and u. The letter y is also sometimes considered a vowel, but most consider it to not be so.

For those who have heard Catalan people pronounce it as "Barthelona", that was probably because they were speaking Spanish: in the variety of Spanish spoken in Catalonia it is pronounced "Barthelona".

What does it mean and how is it used? While these literally mean “uncle,” and “aunt,” they're also used informally to generally refer to another person. In the same way English speakers use “dude” or “guy” (“Look at those guys over there!” or “Who said that?” “I don't know, just some dude.”) Spaniards use tío or tía.

Every language has an specific information density. Spanish is less "dense" than English, meaning that they need to speak more words to transmit the same amount of information for a given phrase, that's why they speak faster than English speakers.

Note that Spanish words never start with a RR; it is only found in the middle of words.

However, in most of Latin America, it's not pronounced like that, it's pronounced with a “j” sound, e.g. “yo” (meaning “I” in Spanish) is pronounced “joe”, and the same thing goes for the double-L: “ll”, as in “llegar”, which would be pronounced as “yay-gar” in Spain but “jay-gar” in most of Latin America.

For example, llegado (arrived) would be pronounced “llegao”. The pronunciation of “ll” is also more commonly pronounced as “j”, which is different to most parts of mainland Spain.

The Spanish word for 'yes' is 'sí. ' These two terms have different meanings in Spanish. 'Sí' with the accent or 'tilde' in the 'í' means 'yes,' while 'si' without the accent means 'if.

Mexico is pronounced "Mehico" and not "Mexico". The reason for this pronunciation is because the original name of the country was actually "Mexica". When the Spanish arrived in Mexico, they changed the name to "Mexico" because that is how they pronounced it.

How do Mexicans say howdy? ›

¡hola!, ¿qué hay? {interj.}

Black Country Dialect (BCD) appears to keep some features of Early Middle English. This is particularly true of its vowels, which seem to be systematically different from those of standard English. Think of the word pairs tay/ tea, pays/ peas.

Wench is an affectionate term for a girl or young woman.

Not to be confused with taters (potatoes) tatters are men in lorries that drive around playing a bugle on a Sunday morning, looking for free scrap metal.

The sound or phoneme / k / can be represented in Spanish written by the letters K, Q / q, and C.

Phonograms are common groups of letters that represent the same sounds, such as –ight in bright, light, sight, and so on. Teaching children phonograms, such as –er, -all, and – tch, helps avoid the problem of children trying to read these letter groups using the individual sounds associated with these letters.

Pronunciation of letters "s" and "z"

In Spanish, the letter s is pronounced exactly as in English. The letter z is pronounced the same, as an "s" in Latin America, however in Spain it is pronounced similar to "th" as in the word "thin".

One common mistake that native English speakers make when they speak Spanish is to pronounce the letters b and the v differently. Remember that, in Spanish, the b and v are pronounced the same way—[b] at the beginning of a word or after m and n, and [β] in all other positions in a word.

There is one letter in Spanish that trips up both native speakers and new learners: H. Because it is the only silent letter in Spanish, it can be quite confusing to remember which words are spelled with an H.

The most common 2-letter consonant blends are: bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, sl, br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr, sc, sk, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, and tw. Here are some words with 2-letter consonant blends: Bl: blank, black, blue, blister, blight, blast. Fr: fried, French, frank, frolic, frigid.

What are two letter sound combinations? ›

A digraph is two letters combined to make a single sound in written or spoken English. The digraph can consist of consonants and vowels.

Two letter combinations, like “oo” as in “book”, “er” as in “her”, “ph” as in “phone” and “ey” as in “key” Three letter combinations, like “igh” as in “high”, “dge” as in “bridge”, “tch” as in “catch” and “ere” as in “here”.

The Spanish letter Z is pronounced like the soft C (the letter C in front of E and I); that is, it is pronounced like a TH (in Spain)* or an S (in Latin America). * This is what you will hear in the sound files. Note: The letter Z can never precede an E or an I in Spanish; it is replaced by the letter C.

The story goes like this: a medieval king of Spain spoke with a lisp. Wanting to imitate royalty, courtiers picked it up. The resulting th sound wormed its way into the Spanish language. It would be a great tale of linguistics, history, and idolization of the ruling class—if it were true.

Apparently, one of Spain's medieval kings, usually identified as King Ferdinand, had a lisp. As a form of respect, and to please their king, Spanish people started speaking with this now characteristic sound called by some as the Spanish lisp.

In Spanish, C makes two basic sounds: a hard C and a soft C.

The letter 'c' in Spanish has 3 different pronunciations. Much like in English, there's the soft 'c', the hard 'c,' and the 'ch' sound. The pronunciation for the soft 'c' is much like the 's' in English, and the hard 'c' sounds a lot like a 'k;' the 'ch' sound is the same one as in English too.

LL. Although this is not considered a letter anymore by the RAE, the pronunciation of the “ll” varies widely from region to region. Most commonly, it is pronounced like the “y” in the word “yes”.