With 500 Million speakers, Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, English, and Hindi. Spanish is a Romance Language that belongs to the Indo-European language family. Spanish is no doubt an old language and the first written documents that have some scattered Spanish text dates back to the 10th century. But the first poem that can be said to have authentically Spanish text is Cantar de mío Cid (“Song of My Cid”). The poem is an epic poem.

With its unique features and pronunciation, it stands as strong as any other indo-European language.  Let us know more about the language by knowing its alphabet and Basic pronunciation rules:

Spanish Alphabet has 29 characters in which 5 are vowels and the remaining are consonants. This is very similar to that of English, but the pronunciation of various characters is different from that of English. Following is the list of alphabets and the names of the characters are given in brackets:  

Vowels:

a (a)  e(e)   i(i)   o(o)   u(u)

Vowels can be written with accents in Spanish.

Like papá, médico, radío, millón, tú.

Consonants:

b (be)   c (ce)    ch (che)    d (de)    f (efe) 

g (ge)   h (hache)   j (jota)   k (ka)     l (ele) 

ll (elle)   m (eme)   n (ene)     ñ (eñe)    

p (pe)   q (cu)  r (erre)    s (ese)   t (te)   v (uve)    

w (uve doble)    x (equis)   y (i griega)  z (zeta)

There are 39 different phonic sounds in Spanish. The pronunciation of most of the characters is similar to that of English and only a few sounds are different from that of English.  Also, many of the same characters have different sounds in both languages. 

In Spanish, 5 vowel sounds are produced from the vocal cords. They are

a, e, I, o, u

a is pronounced as ah as in father.

e is pronounced as eh as in the English short vowel E.

i is pronounced as ee as in the word machine.

o is pronounced as oh as in cold.

u is pronounced as oo as in tuba, but silent behind a Q.

The vowel sounds make 80% of speech sounds while speaking.

Most of the consonant sounds in Spanish are similar to those in English. The main difference of consonant sounds lies in the following:

The sound of b is almost identical to the letter v in English.

The letter h is not pronounced in Spanish.

The letter j is pronounced as h.

The letter g is pronounced in two ways:

As Spanish j when it is followed by e or i.

As g of English when it is followed by a, or u.

Letter c is also pronounced in two ways in Spanish

As the letter z when it is followed by e or i.

As the letter k when it is followed by a, o, or u.

Letter ll is pronounced as y of English.

The list provides only an idea about the pronunciation. If you want to learn the language deeply then you must learn it from an expert who can set your strings of mind according to the pronunciation of the language.  For this, you may be in search of a language expert and you can find one @Multibhashi, a growing language training institution. MNultibhashi provides online Spanish classes with experts. So! Go and grab the opportunity to learn this new language! All the best!