page_title: Spanish orthography
hierarchical_section_title: Spanish orthography
caption_attribution_description: Español: «Ortografía de la lengua española» (2010)
context_page_description: Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Notable features of Spanish punctuation include the lack of the serial comma and the inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩ ⟨¡⟩.
  Spanish uses capital letters much less often than English; they are not used on adjectives derived from proper nouns and book titles capitalize only the first word.
  Spanish uses only the acute accent, over any vowel: ⟨á é í ó ú⟩. This accent is used to mark the tonic syllable, though it may also be used occasionally to distinguish homophones such as si and sí.
context_section_description: Spanish orthography is the orthography used in the Spanish language. The alphabet uses the Latin script. The spelling is fairly phonemic, especially in comparison to more opaque orthographies like English, having a relatively consistent mapping of graphemes to phonemes; in other words, the pronunciation of a given Spanish-language word can largely be predicted from its spelling and to a slightly lesser extent vice versa. Notable features of Spanish punctuation include the lack of the serial comma and the inverted question and exclamation marks: ⟨¿⟩ ⟨¡⟩.
  Spanish uses capital letters much less often than English; they are not used on adjectives derived from proper nouns (e.g. francés, español, portugués from Francia, España, and Portugal, respectively) and book titles capitalize only the first word (e.g. La rebelión de las masas).
  Spanish uses only the acute accent, over any vowel: ⟨á é í ó ú⟩. This accent is used to mark the tonic (stressed) syllable, though it may also be used occasionally to distinguish homophones such as si ('if') and sí ('yes'). The only other diacritics used are the tilde on the letter ⟨ñ⟩, which is considered a separate letter from ⟨n⟩, and the diaeresis used in the sequences ⟨güe⟩ and ⟨güi⟩—as in bilingüe ('bilingual')—to indicate that the ⟨u⟩ is pronounced, [w], rather than having the usual silent role that it plays in unmarked ⟨gue⟩ and ⟨gui⟩.
  In contrast with English, Spanish has an official body that governs linguistic rules, orthography among them: the Royal Spanish Academy, which makes periodic changes to the orthography. It is the policy of the Royal Spanish Academy that, when quoting older texts, one should update spelling to the current rules, except in discussions of the history of the Spanish language.
caption: Ortografía de la lengua española (2010)
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