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The Spanish language is written using the Spanish alphabet, which is the ISO Latin script with one additional letter, eñe ñ , for a total of 27 letters. [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.
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Spanish on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Spanish in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
In the 16th century, as the Spanish colonization of the Americas was beginning, the phoneme now represented by the letter j had begun to change its place of articulation from palato-alveolar [ʃ] to palatal [ç] and to velar [x], like German ch in Bach (see History of Spanish and Old Spanish language).
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association.
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The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.
Upside-down marks, simple in the era of hand typesetting, were originally recommended by the Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy), in the second edition of the Ortografía de la lengua castellana (Orthography of the Castilian language) in 1754 [3] recommending it as the symbol indicating the beginning of a question in written Spanish—e.g. "¿Cuántos años tienes?"
Southern European Spanish (Andalusian Spanish, Murcian Spanish, etc.) and several lowland dialects in Latin America (such as those from the Caribbean, Panama, and the Atlantic coast of Colombia) exhibit more extreme forms of simplification of coda consonants: word-final dropping of /s/ (e.g. compás [komˈpa] 'musical beat' or 'compass')