Catalan alphabet
Catalan alphabet is The Catalan Latin alphabet, 35 letters. 27 letters: the Latin alphabet plus ç — and unstressed vowels that refuse to sound the way they are written. The characters are grouped: signs of its own, five vowels — eight sounds, the letters that mislead. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.
Signs of its own
ç is the only letter with a cedilla, l·l the only mid-word dot. The combinations are not letters, but no menu can be read without them.
Five vowels — eight sounds
The main difficulty of Catalan is not the letters. Unstressed vowels lose themselves: a and e merge into one muffled sound, o turns into u. This is the norm, and it is how you recognize a native speaker.
The letters that mislead
Here Catalan parts ways with Spanish and with what the eye expects. j is a zh, s between vowels is a z, and a final r goes silent.
- H hsilenthac
- J jzhjota
- G gg before a, o, u; zh before e and ige
- V vv (sounds almost like b)uve baixa
- B bb; sounds like p at the end of a wordbe alta
- C ck; s before e and ice
- Q qk (always with a silent u)cu
- S ss; z between vowelsesse
- Ss sss (always voiceless)essa doble
- R rr; usually silent at the end of a worderre
- Rr rra rolled r (between vowels)erra doble
- Z zzzeta
- Y yy or ee (loanwords only)i grega
Read exactly as they look
Nothing to learn here: the sound is exactly the one you expect.
What to know about this Latin script
There are 27 letters: the Latin alphabet plus ç. The course follows the central norm (Barcelona, Girona): that is what radio and television speak, and what schools teach. The Valencian norm (AVL) is spelled the same way; only a handful of words and some stress marks part ways. Written stress is marked with the acute (á, é, í, ó, ú) and the grave (à, è, ò). These are not separate letters, only marks. They show where the stress falls, and the choice between them tells the two e-sounds apart.
Where this script came from and why it looks the way it does
The dot in the middle of a word is not a typo but a letter: l·l, the “ela geminada”, makes you pronounce two “l” sounds in a row and tells apart words like cel·la (a cellar) and cella (an eyebrow). It was Pompeu Fabra, at the start of the twentieth century, who fixed the modern norm with this dot.
Pompeu Fabra, «Gramàtica catalana», Barcelona, 1918
Test yourself
Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.
- Which character reads as “ah; unstressed — a muffled "uh"”?
Vowel reduction is not an accent but the norm: casa sounds like "KAH-zuh"
- Which character reads as “s (always)”?
The only letter with a cedilla: caça is "hunting", comença is "it begins". It sounds like c before e/i but can turn up anywhere
- Which character reads as “f”?
An ordinary f
- Which character reads as “ee”?
A clean ee; on its own, the word i means "and"
- Which character reads as “l”?
A light l, thinner than the dark l at the end of English "full"
How to learn letters so they stay
You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 35 signs in one sitting.
Frequently asked
How many letters in the Catalan alphabet?
35 letters — The Catalan Latin alphabet. The characters have capital and small forms.
Can I listen to how the Catalan letters sound?
Yes. 35 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.
How long does it take to learn the Catalan alphabet?
A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.
Where to start: letters or words?
Both at once: you can already read this script, so a separate letters course is not needed — a reference table is enough.