The Esperanto Alphabet

Esperanto has 28 letters, and the alphabet does something no natural language manages: one letter always makes one sound, and one sound is always written with one letter.

That is not a simplification for beginners. It is the whole system, and it holds for every word in the language. You can read aloud a word you have never seen and be right, and you can spell a word you have only heard and be right. English speakers should sit with that for a moment, given though, through, tough, thought and thorough.

Six of the letters carry a circumflex or a breve and do not exist in English. Three English letters are absent entirely.

The 28 letters

Consonants are named by their sound plus -o; the vowels name themselves. So the alphabet recites as a, bo, co, ĉo, do, e, fo... - even the naming is regular. The vowels are pure, as in Spanish: an Esperanto o stays where you put it rather than drifting off into a diphthong.

What is missing, and why

There is no q, w, x or y. Their jobs are covered: kv does the work of qu, ŭ does w, ks does x, and j does the consonant y. Foreign names keep their spelling, so you will see them, but no Esperanto word contains one.

That absence is what makes the x-system below unambiguous, and it was almost certainly the point.

The six hatted letters

These are the ones that make Esperanto look unfamiliar on the page, and there are only six. Esperantists call them the hatted letters (ĉapelitaj literoj), and the crucial thing to understand is that they are not accented variants of c, g, h, j, s and u. Each one is a letter in its own right, with its own name, its own fixed sound and its own place in the alphabet: ĉ files after c in every dictionary, ĝ after g, and so on. The circumflex is not doing something mysterious to the letter underneath, the way a French accent sometimes is; ĉ relates to c the way English w relates to v, which is to say it merely looks similar.

Five of them are just the plain letter's sound made "wider": c is ts and ĉ is ch; g is g and ĝ is j; s is s and ŝ is sh. The circumflex is doing consistent work rather than being decoration.

Ĥ is the odd one out. It is genuinely rare, it has been quietly retreating for a century, and several words that once used it now prefer k: ĥemio has largely become kemio. You need to recognise it and you will seldom write it.

Typing them: the x-system

Nobody has ĉ on their keyboard. Two conventions exist and one has won.

The x-system writes the accent as a following x:

It is unambiguous precisely because x is not a letter of the Esperanto alphabet, so sx can never be anything but ŝ. This is why the word pages on this site have slugs like sxi and gxis while the pages themselves print ŝi and ĝis.

The h-system is Zamenhof's original, writing ch, gh, jh, sh and a bare u. It is ambiguous (is sh ŝ, or an s followed by an h?) and it sorts badly, so it survives mostly in old print.

Write x-system online and nobody will mind. Write the real letters wherever you can.

Stress: the rule with no exceptions

Stress falls on the second-to-last syllable. Every word. Always.

ES-tas, pa-RO-li, es-pe-RAN-to, in-ter-na-CI-a

There is no list of exceptions, no marking to learn, and no word where you have to guess. Compare English, where record is stressed differently depending on whether you are keeping one or making one.

Two things worth knowing when you count syllables:

• Every vowel is its own syllable. Familio is fa-mi-LI-o, four syllables, not three.
• Ŭ is not a vowel. Aŭ is one syllable, so antaŭ is AN-taŭ.

Reading practice

Every one of these follows from the table above. Cover the right column.

ĉu - CHOO, whether

ĝis - JEESS, until

ŝi - SHEE, she

knabo - KNA-bo, boy. Both consonants are pronounced; there is no silent k.

scias - STSEE-as, knows. s then c (ts), exactly as written.

aŭskultas - a-oo-SKOOL-tas, listens.

That last pair is the real test of the system, and they work. Esperanto never asks you to un-say a letter.

Is there an Esperanto alphabet song?

Honest answer: there is no single canonical one, in the way English has the ABC song. Plenty of learner songs exist online, but none has the status of a standard, and we are not going to pretend one does.

The good news is that you barely need one. The letter names are all one open syllable (a, bo, co, ĉo, do, e, fo...), so the 28 of them chant to almost any tune you like, including the melody the English ABC song borrowed - an eighteenth-century French air, long out of copyright - if you are willing to squeeze two extra letters into the home stretch. More to the point, the song exists in English because English spelling has to be memorised. Esperanto's does not: once you know the one-letter-one-sound rule, the alphabet has nothing left to teach you, which may be why nobody ever felt the need to canonise a song for it.

What to take away

• 28 letters, one sound each, no exceptions, in both directions.
• Six accented letters, five of which are the plain letter widened.
• No q, w, x or y, which is what makes the x-system safe.
• Stress is always on the second-to-last syllable.

Ten minutes here and you can pronounce every word in the language, including ones nobody has invented yet.