Appendix:Spanish alphabet

The Spanish language is written using the Latin alphabet, along with a few special characters: the vowels with an acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú), the vowel u with diaeresis (ü), and the additional consonant ñ. The letter k mostly appears in foreign loanwords (such as karate, koala, etc.), although there are a couple of native words that do start with the letter k (such as kilo, kilogramo, kilómetro or kiosko). Additionally, the letter w hardly almost ever appears in native words and usually only appears in foreign loanwords (such as walkman, kiwi, ....) etc.

The following letter names appear in preference order for speaking in Spanish from Spain and Latin America.

The vowels with accents and diaeresis are considered variants of the plain vowel letters, but ñ is considered a letter in its own right, and so it appears in dictionaries after the letter n. Therefore, for example, in a Spanish dictionary piñata comes after pinza.

The digraphs ch (named che), ll (named elle or doble ele) have traditionally also been treated as letters of the alphabet in their own rights, since 1803. However, in 1994, the tenth congress of the Association of Spanish Language Academies agreed to alphabetize both ch and ll as ordinary pairs of letters in the dictionary by request of UNESCO and other international organizations, while keeping them as distinct letters for the alphabet and other purposes. In 2010, the Spanish Language Academies agreed that these two digraphs were not separate letters. Similarly, the digraph rr (named erre or doble ere) has also sometimes been considered as a separate letter in the alphabet, but it no longer is.