Spanish orthography

[1] Although the letters ⟨k⟩ and ⟨w⟩ are part of the alphabet, they appear only in loanwords such as karate, kilo, waterpolo and wolframio (tungsten or wolfram) and in sensational spellings: okupa, bakalao.

Besides the letters, other characters are specially associated with Spanish-language texts: Spanish orthographic rules are similar, but not identical, to those of other Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, such as Portuguese, Catalan and Galician.

This is required to keep the regularity of the conjugated forms in terms of sound, when a letter represents different sounds, or to avoid unusual combinations, such as -ze- or -qua-: The same occurs in other parts of speech when combined with certain suffixes, such as -ito/-ita for nouns and pronouns or -ísimo/-ísima for adjectives and adverbs: taza → tacita; poco → poquito; abrigo → abriguito; agua → agüita; feroz → ferocísimo; loco → loquísimo; largo → larguísimo; exiguo → exigüísimo.

Likewise, nouns and adjectives ending in z change this letter to c in the plural for similar reasons: lápiz → lápices; feroz → feroces.

The only consonant letters that can be doubled in the Spanish orthography are ⟨l⟩, ⟨r⟩ (as the digraphs ⟨ll⟩ and ⟨rr⟩, respectively), ⟨c⟩ (only when they represent different sounds: e.g. acción, diccionario), ⟨n⟩ (e.g. innato, perenne, connotar, dígannos), and ⟨b⟩ (in a few words with the prefix sub-: subbase, subbético).

The diphthongs ⟨ai, ei, oi⟩ are usually written ⟨ay, ey, oy⟩ at the end of words (e. g. hay, ley, voy), though exceptions may occur in loanwords (e.g. bonsái, agnusdéi).

The letter ⟨y⟩ is conserved in rarely used encliticized verbal forms like doyte, haylas (it is more normal to say te doy, las hay).

Otherwise, ⟨y⟩ for a vowel or semivowel occurs only in some archaically spelled proper names and their derivations: Guaymas, guaymeño, and also fraybentino (from Fray Bentos with regular usage of ⟨y⟩ in a word-final diphthong).

The diaeresis may occur also in Spanish poetry, occasionally, over either vowel of a diphthong, to indicate an irregular disyllabic pronunciation required by the meter (vïuda, to be pronounced as three syllables).

As implemented in the MS-DOS operating system and its successor Microsoft Windows, a ⟨ç⟩/⟨Ç⟩ pair—not required in Spanish but needed for Catalan, Portuguese, and French—is typically added, and the use of the acute accent and diaeresis with capital letters (⟨Á⟩, ⟨É⟩, ⟨Í⟩, ⟨Ó⟩, ⟨Ú⟩, ⟨Ü⟩) is supported.

A word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier does not have a common linguistic term in English, but in Spanish receives the name sobresdrújula.

The subsequent 2010 reform, though, declared that for orthographic and syllabification purposes such letter combinations should always be considered diphthongs, so the only correct spelling is now guion and truhan.

Names of letters and musical notes are written without the accent, even if they have homonymous clitics: a, de, e, o, te, u; mi, la, si.

The tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies deemed the use of an accent unnecessary, as typewriting eliminates possible confusion due to the different shapes of ⟨0⟩ (zero) and ⟨o⟩ (the letter).

The RAE prescribes extranjerismos crudos to be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available: Spanish-speakers use both English-style and angled quotation marks, so the above example could also be written as follows: This typographical emphasis is prescribed by the RAE since 1999.

According to the current Ortografía, Latin expressions (e. g. curriculum vitae, grosso modo) are treated as unadapted foreign words, so they are also typographically emphasized.

This rule includes hiatuses with an intervening silent h: alcohol is syllabified as al-co-hol, but the only way to hyphenate it at the end of a line is al-cohol.

The letter x between vowels phonetically represents two consonants separated by a syllable border, but hyphenation at the end of line is permitted before the x: ta-xi, bo-xeo.

Letter symbols such as those of chemical elements or measurement units are written following international conventions and do not require the abbreviation period: H (hidrógeno), kg (kilogramo).

Numbers more than 30 (cardinal and ordinal) are usually written separately, e.g. treinta y cinco, trigésimo quinto, but one-word spellings such as treintaicinco, trigesimoquinto are also accepted by the current Ortografía.

The sequences ⟨ze⟩ and ⟨zi⟩ do not occur in modern Spanish except some loanwords: zeugma, zigurat, zipizape; some borrowed words have double spellings: zinc/cinc.

In Spain, the change to use the familiar round s everywhere, as in the current usage, was mainly accomplished between the years 1760 and 1766; for example, the multi-volume España Sagrada made the switch with volume 16 (1762).

The use of accent marks in printing varies by period, due to reforms successively promulgated by the Spanish Royal Academy.

[51] The accent-marked infinitives such as oír, reír, sonreír began to outnumber the unaccented form around 1920,[52] dropped the accent mark again in 1952,[53] and regained it in 1959.

Fusing of number-names above 30 (e.g. treintaicinco, cuarentaiocho) is rare, but accepted by the DPD 2005[65] and the Ortografía 2010[66] besides the usual separate spelling: treinta y cinco, cuarenta y ocho.

The fourth edition of the Diccionario de la lengua castellana (1803) stated that ⟨k⟩ may be in any case replaced by ⟨c⟩ or ⟨qu⟩ and did not give any words beginning with ⟨k⟩, while still including the letter in the alphabet.

Andrés Bello succeeded in making his proposal official in several South American countries, but they later returned to the standard set by the Real Academia Española.

This is generally due to the origin of the word (or the present pronunciation) containing the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ sound or another sibilant that is not used in modern standard Spanish.

The inverted question and exclamation marks were gradually adopted following the Real Academia's recommendations in the second edition of the Ortografía de la lengua castellana in 1754.

The colon is the standard mark in Spanish for addressing people in letters (Estimado profesor:, Querido amigo:); using the comma in this case is considered nonstandard.