Overview of the Spanish Language
Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with a few special letters: the vowels can be marked with an acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) to mark stress when it doesn't follow the normal pattern or to differentiate otherwise equally spelt words (see below), diaeresis u (ü) after g to indicate a [gw] or [gu] pronunciation, and n with tilde (ñ) to indicate the palatal nasal [J]. Traditionally, the digraphs ch, ll and rr were considered separate letters, but this is no longer the case.
Written Spanish precedes exclamatory and interrogative clauses with inverted question and exclamation marks, examples: ¿Qué dices? (What do you mean?) ¡No es verdad! (That's not true!). It is one of the few languages whose written form does so.
The Spanish orthography makes it that every speaker can guess the pronunciation from the written form. While the same pronunciation could be misspelt in several ways — there are homophones, because of the language's silent h, vacilations between b and v, and between c and z (and between c, z, and s in Latin America and some parts of the Peninsula) — the orthography is more coherent than, say, English orthography.
A word with final stress is called aguda; a word with penultimate stress is called llana or grave; a word with antepenultimate stress (stress on the third last syllable) is called esdrújula; and a word with preantepenultimate stress (on the fourth last syllable) or earlier is called sobresdrújula in which case there is a secondary stress towards the end of the word. All esdrújula and sobresdrújula words have written accent marks.
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