The Italian Alphabet

The Italian alphabet has twenty-one letters. The five English letters it does not use natively are j, k, w, x and y, which turn up mainly in borrowed words and in a handful of names.

That smaller inventory is part of why Italian spelling is so straightforward. Fewer letters, fewer combinations, fewer arbitrary decisions to memorise.

Italian spelling is a faithful servant of sound

This is the thing to appreciate before anything else. With very few exceptions, an Italian word is pronounced exactly as it is written, and written exactly as it is pronounced. The exceptions are small: spelling does not show whether an e or an o is open or closed (pèsca, peach, and pésca, fishing, are both written pesca), or which of its two sounds an s or a z takes. There is nothing like the French silent ending or the English vowel lottery.

The rules worth knowing on day one:

• c and g are hard before a, o, u and soft before e and i. So the c in casa is a k sound, and before an e or an i it becomes a ch sound.
• ch and gh force the hard sound in front of e and i. That is the entire job of the h: it is a spelling device, never pronounced.
• gli is a single sound with no English equivalent, roughly the lli in million but further back.
• gn is the ny of canyon.
• sc is a sh sound before e and i, and sk elsewhere.
• z is ts or dz, never the English z: ts in pizza, zio and grazie, dz in zero and zanzara. Which one a word takes has to be learned with the word.
• Double consonants are genuinely doubled, held roughly twice as long, and the difference changes words. This is the one thing English speakers systematically underdo.

The accents

Italian uses two, and they do less work than French accents do:

• The grave accent is much the commoner. It marks a stressed final vowel, as in città and più.
• The acute accent appears on a small number of words, chiefly perché and its relatives.

Accents on the final syllable are compulsory and carry meaning. The classic pair is e, which means and, against è, the same letter with a grave accent, which means is. One mark, two entirely different words, and they appear in almost every sentence you will read.

Stress, which is mostly free

Italian stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable. When it does not, and falls on the final one, an accent marks it. When it falls further back than the second-to-last, nothing marks it and you simply have to know, which is the one place Italian spelling stops being helpful.