The Spanish Alphabet: All 27 Letters, With Audio and the Ñ Story
The Spanish alphabet has 27 letters: the same 26 as English, plus ñ. That is the whole answer. If you already read English, you can already read most Spanish words on sight, which is why Spanish is one of the fastest languages for an English speaker to start reading.
The catch is not the letters, it is the sounds. Spanish spelling is almost perfectly phonetic: unlike English, a letter reliably makes the same sound every time. Learn the 27 sounds once and you can pronounce any Spanish word you have never seen, correctly, forever. English speakers cannot say that about their own language.
This is the complete reference: every letter with audio and its name, the sounds that catch English speakers, the letters that were deleted from the alphabet in 2010, the Spain versus Latin America splits, and how to spell your name over the phone.
The Spanish Alphabet: All 27 Letters
Tap any letter to hear a native voice say its name.
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English has five vowel letters and about twenty vowel sounds. It is chaos: through, though, tough, thought. Spanish has five vowel letters and exactly five vowel sounds, and they never change:
a = ah, always. casa, mapa, nada.
e = eh, always. mesa, verde.
i = ee, always. sí, libro.
o = oh, always. oro, como.
u = oo, always. luna, mucho.
They are also pure and short. The English "oh" glides into a "w" at the end: say "no" slowly and you will hear it. Spanish no does not glide. It starts at o and stops there. That single habit, killing the glide, does more for your accent than any grammar chapter.
This is the reason Spanish reading is nearly free for English speakers: there are no silent letters (except H), no -ough, no exceptions to learn. Once you have the 27 sounds, you can read a Spanish newspaper aloud, correctly, without understanding a word of it.
Ñ: The Letter That Defines Spanish
ñ is not "n with a decoration". It is a separate letter, with its own place in the dictionary between N and O, and it changes meaning:
año (year) versus ano (anus). This is the classic, and the mistake is as bad as it sounds. Feliz año nuevo with a plain n wishes someone a happy new something else entirely.
campaña (campaign) versus campana (bell).
cañón (canyon) versus canon (canon). English borrowed "canyon" directly from cañón, spelling out the sound.
The tilde came from medieval scribes: a doubled nn was abbreviated by writing one n with a small n on top, which flattened into the squiggle. So año was once anno, from Latin annus. Italian kept the nn (anno), Spanish compressed it.
It is pronounced ny, as in "canyon" or "onion". And it is a point of national pride: when the EU proposed dropping it from keyboards in 1991, Spain refused, and writer Gabriel García Márquez publicly defended it. Today it is the symbol of the language itself, and of the .es internet.
The Letters That Were Deleted in 2010
If you learned Spanish before 2010, you were taught 29 letters, including CH and LL as separate letters with their own dictionary sections. In 2010 the Real Academia Española removed them, ruling that they are digraphs, two letters making one sound, not letters in their own right.
The sounds did not disappear. Only the alphabetical status did:
ch still says ch as in "church": chico, mucho, ocho.
ll still says y as in "yes": llamar, paella, calle.
The practical consequence: in a modern dictionary, chico files under C, not under a separate CH section. Older dictionaries put it after cuyo. If you are using a pre-2010 Spanish dictionary, this is why you cannot find anything.
RR was never a letter, though it makes a distinct sound, and 2010 also renamed some letters (i griega became ye, officially, though almost nobody says it).
The Sounds That Catch English Speakers
H is silent. Always.Hola is OH-la. Hospital is os-pee-TAL. Hola and ola (wave) are pronounced identically. There is no exception.
B and V are the same sound. This is not an accent, it is the language: Spanish speakers genuinely do not distinguish them, and children misspell b and v the way English children confuse there and their. To ask which spelling, Spaniards say ¿be de burro o uve de vaca?, "b as in donkey or v as in cow?".
J and G before e/i are throaty.Jamón, jefe, gente, girar. It is the rasp of Scottish "loch", not an English j. José is ho-SEH.
The two Rs. A single r between vowels is a light tap, close to the dd in American "ladder": pero (but). A double rr, or an r starting a word, is rolled: perro (dog), rojo. pero and perro are different words, and this is the pair every learner practises.
C and Z split by continent. In Spain, c before e/i and z everywhere are a soft th: gracias is GRA-thyas, zapato is tha-PA-to. In Latin America they are a plain s: GRA-syas, sa-PA-to. Neither is wrong, neither is "lisping", and roughly 90% of Spanish speakers use the s. Pick your country and stay consistent.
X is a shape-shifter. Usually ks (taxi). But in México, Oaxaca and Texas it is the throaty h: ME-hi-ko. These are fossils of old Spanish spelling, preserved in place names.
Pronunciation: What the Table Cannot Give You
A table can tell you that j is "throaty". It cannot make your throat do it.
The Spanish rr is the clearest case. Nobody has ever learned to roll an R from a written description, because the instruction "vibrate the tip of your tongue against the ridge behind your teeth" is not something you can consciously execute. You learn it by hearing it and imitating it, badly, repeatedly, until one day it clicks.
The only fix is to hear a native say the whole word, then say it back out loud, several times, until your mouth stops resisting. That listen and repeat loop is called shadowing, and it is the fastest way to turn a sound you recognise into one you can produce. It is how the Hyperpolyglot app handles every phrase: real sentences, native audio, looped until they come out automatically. Available on iOS, Android, and Web.
Accents Are Instructions, Not Decoration
Spanish accents do exactly one job: they tell you where the stress falls. They are never optional and never stylistic.
The default rules, which cover most words:
Words ending in a vowel, N or S are stressed on the second-to-last syllable: casa, hablan, lunes.
Words ending in any other consonant are stressed on the last syllable: hablar, ciudad, feliz.
An accent marks the exception: árbol, canción, inglés.
There is a second, unrelated use: telling identical words apart. Sí (yes) versus si (if). Tú (you) versus tu (your). Él (he) versus el (the). Más (more) versus mas (but).
And two more marks: the diaeresis in pingüino, which means "actually pronounce the u", and the upside-down ¿ and ¡, which open questions and exclamations so you know the intonation before you start reading the sentence. Spanish is the only major language that does this, and it is genuinely useful.
How to Spell Your Name Over the Phone
You will need this at a hotel or a bank. Spanish speakers do not use the NATO alphabet, they improvise with cities and names:
A de Antonio, B de Barcelona, C de Carmen, D de Dolores, E de España...
The one you truly need is the B/V clarification: be de burro or uve de vaca. Some say be grande / ve chica (big B, little V) in Latin America. Without it, nobody can write your name.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Pronouncing the H. It is silent. Every time. Hola starts with a vowel.
Writing ano instead of año. The tilde is not optional. It changes the word, and this one is memorable.
Gliding your vowels. Spanish o does not drift into a w. Five vowels, five clean sounds.
Making V different from B. They are the same sound in Spanish.
Looking for CH and LL in the dictionary. Gone since 2010. Chico is under C.
Treating accents as decoration. They are stress instructions, and sí is not si.
Mixing the Spain "th" and the Latin American "s". Pick one country and commit.
Bonus: The Alphabet Song
Spanish children learn the alphabet to a simple chant, running a, be, ce, che, de, e, efe... Note that many versions still include che and elle: the song is older than the 2010 reform, and schools have been slow to update it. If you hear a Spanish speaker recite 29 letters, they learned it before you did.
Learn the five vowels first, drill the pero/perro pair until it stops being a coin flip, and accept that H is silent forever. Do it with real audio rather than a table, and you will be reading Spanish aloud, accurately, within a week.
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