The Shwah Alphabet for Spanish	español Contents

One often hears Spanish mentioned as an example of a language with good orthography, and there's a lot of truth to that. Spanish words are written as they're pronounced, and Spanish dictionaries don't even have pronunciation guides. But the choice of letters for sounds is in fact quite odd.

Spanish vowels are fine: there are only five vowels, always the same length, and a dozen or so diphthongs and tripthongs. The only oddity is that stressed e and o become ie and ue, respectively, but the orthography reflects that change, so it's not a problem. The problem is the consonants, which form a very regular system, but many of them are absent from the Latin alphabet, while others are represented by multiple letters or share a letter with other sounds.

Here is a summary of the problems:

• Voiced occlusives b d g are pronounced as fricatives β δ γ except when initial or following a nasal (or sometimes l, as in alba).
• Likewise, y is fricative (like zh) except when initial, in which case it is affricated (like dj).
• Sibilant s becomes voiced z before voiced consonants (but not intervocalically as in English).
• The k sound is represented by c before u o a but qu before i e.
• Likewise, the g/γ pair is represented by g before u o a but gu before i e.
• The θ sound is represented by z before u o a but also c before i e.
• The j sound is represented by j before u o a but also g before i e.
• There is no letter for the palatal ll (λ).
• There is no letter for the trilled r, so it's written rr where the tapped r might occur, and just plain r otherwise.
• There is no letter for the affricate ch.
• The letter h is always silent, and the rules for its presence or absence are difficult even for native speakers, e.g. (h) exágono.
• The letter x represents s initially or before another consonant, but ks otherwise.

In addition to the problems above, Spanish - the world's second most spoken language with more than 330 million speakers - has substantial dialectical variation. Two variants are widespread enough to merit names in Spanish: seseo and yeísmo. In seseo dialects, including Andalucian and American Spanish, the letter θ is missing altogether, and zs are pronounced as ss. In yeísto dialects, which include all the Spanish spoken outside of Castille and a strip of the Andes between Colombia and Paraguay, the λ is missing altogether and ll is pronounced as y. There are also dialects in which s is always pronounced as z (ceceo) or dropped (Cuba), in which ll is pronounced as sh (Argentina), in which x represents j (Mexico), in which y is never affricated (Rio Plato), and many more.

When Spanish is written in the Latin alphabet, all these dialects write the words alike (with minor exceptions): Bilbaoans and Balboans agree that the word for match is spelled cerilla, they just don't agree whether it's pronounced θeriλa or seriya. But when writing Spanish in the Shwah alphabet, both dialects write it as they pronounce it, and we say they have two different words for match.

Here is a table showing the Spanish vowels:

The first column shows the five vowels. They are written high when accented, low otherwise. The next four columns show diphthongs (in accented form, although they also occur in unaccented form, with both vowels low, as in aumente or Europa). The triphthongs (e.g. Uruguay) aren't shown, but they're straightforward.

Here is a table showing the Spanish consonants:

The first thing to notice is that the second and third lines, although they show the same Latin letters, offer different letters in Shwah: the difference in pronunciation between b d y g in initial and medial positions is shown in the orthography. Likewise, the voicing of s before voiced consonants as in asno is shown by a change of Shwah letter.

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?