Twenty six letters, five marks that go above and below them, and a spelling reform that makes older books look wrong. Here is the whole system, and how to say your own name down a Portuguese phone line.
Learners tend to skip the alphabet, and then discover about a month in that they cannot spell their own surname to a receptionist. It is one of those small foundations that stays invisible until the moment when it is the only thing you need.
It is also where the accents live, and the accents are not decoration, because every mark above a Portuguese vowel is doing a job. Usually it tells you where the stress falls, or which of two vowel sounds you are looking at. So once you know what each one means, you can read a word you have never seen before and get the sound broadly right.
How many letters there are
Twenty six, the same set English uses.
That is a more recent answer than you might expect. For most of the twentieth century the official Portuguese alphabet ran to twenty three letters, and K, W and Y sat outside it, allowed only in foreign words, scientific symbols and abbreviations. The 1990 orthographic agreement formally readmitted them, and Portugal adopted it from 2009 with a transition that ran to 2015.
So if you find an older textbook insisting the alphabet has twenty three letters, it was not wrong at the time.
The letter names, which you will need sooner than you think
Portuguese letter names are not the English ones, and some of them differ between Portugal and Brazil. These are the European forms.
- A is á, B is bê, C is cê, D is dê, E is é, F is efe
- G is gê, H is agá, I is i, J is jota, K is capa, L is ele
- M is eme, N is ene, O is ó, P is pê, Q is quê, R is erre
- S is esse, T is tê, U is u, V is vê, W is duplo vê
- X is xis, Y is ípsilon, Z is zê
Two of those are worth flagging. In Portugal K is capa and W is duplo vê. A Brazilian will say cá and dábliu. If you learned the alphabet from Brazilian material and then try to spell an email address in Lisbon, those are the two that will produce a blank look.
Y also answers to i grego, literally Greek i, which tells you where Portuguese thinks it came from.
Portuguese accent marks, and what each one does
There are five marks. Two of them mark stress, one marks nasality, one marks a contraction, and one is not an accent at all.
The acute accent, as in á, é, í, ó, ú, marks the stressed syllable. On a, e and o it does a second job and tells you the vowel is open. Café, pé, avó. On i and u there is no open and closed pair to choose between, so there it only marks the stress, as in aí and público.
The circumflex, as in â, ê, ô, also marks stress, but tells you the vowel is closed. Mês, avô, português.
That difference is not cosmetic, because avô is grandfather and avó is grandmother. Same letters and same stress, and the mark is the only thing telling you which person you mean.
The tilde, on ã and õ, marks nasality. It says route this vowel through your nose. Irmã, não, limões, coração. It usually carries the stress too, but its real job is the nasal.
The grave accent appears on exactly one letter, à, and it does something quite different. It marks a contraction of two identical vowels, what Portuguese calls crasis. The preposition a meeting the article a gives you à. Vou à praia is really vou a a praia. It does not mark stress, and you will also meet it in àquele and àquilo.
The cedilla, the little hook under ç, is not an accent. It is a consonant modifier. C normally sounds hard before a, o and u, so the cedilla forces the soft s sound instead. Começo, açúcar, moço. You will never see it before e or i, because c is already soft there and the hook would have nothing to do.
The trema, the two dots you may have seen over a u in older Brazilian spellings like freqüente, is gone from both standards. It survives only in foreign names.
The pairs that behave as one sound
Portuguese has several two-letter combinations that are not two sounds stuck together. Treating them as one thing saves a lot of confusion.
CH is a sh sound, as in chave and chocolate. Not the ch of church.
LH is a single palatal sound made with the middle of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. Filho, trabalho, melhor. It is the gli of Italian famiglia, and the old ll of Spanish llave, although most Spanish speakers now say that ll like a y.
NH is the same position but nasal, the Spanish ñ. Vinho, senhor, manhã.
RR is the strong throat r, as in carro.
GU and QU before e or i usually keep the g and q hard while the u goes silent. Guerra, guitarra, quero, quinze. Not always, though. In frequente and tranquilo that u is pronounced, and since Portugal dropped the two dots that used to mark it in 1945 there is no longer anything on the page to warn you. Those you learn as you meet them.
The letters that are not worth what you assume
Three letters carry less weight than their shape suggests, and it is worth knowing which before you try to sound anything out.
H does no work on its own. At the start of a word it is silent, always, so hora, homem and hoje all begin on their vowel, and its only real job is inside ch, lh and nh.
K, W and Y are the readmitted three. You will meet them in imported words, brand names and units, and almost nowhere else. Quilo is spelled with a q, not a k.
C, G, S and X all change their sound depending on what sits next to them, and X changes with no rule at all. That is pronunciation rather than spelling, and it is covered properly in the guide to European Portuguese pronunciation alongside the vowel reduction and the two R sounds.
Why older books spell things differently
If you buy a secondhand Portuguese textbook you will meet words that no longer look like that.
The 1990 agreement removed consonants that Portuguese had stopped pronouncing. Acção became ação. Óptimo became ótimo. Director became diretor. Adopção became adoção.
The rule was pronunciation, not tidiness, so where the consonant is still said it stayed. In Portugal facto keeps its c, because Portuguese people pronounce it, and it means fact. This matters, because fato in European Portuguese means a suit. Brazil, where the c is not pronounced, writes fato for both.
Neither spelling will stop you being understood, it is simply useful to know why your dictionary and your textbook disagree with each other.
Common questions
How many letters are in the Portuguese alphabet?
Twenty six, the same set as English. It was officially twenty three until the 1990 orthographic agreement readmitted K, W and Y, which Portugal adopted from 2009.
What do the accents in Portuguese mean?
They mark stress, and on a, e and o the acute and circumflex also tell you whether the vowel is open or closed. The tilde marks nasality. The grave marks a contraction rather than stress. The cedilla is not an accent at all, it is a way of forcing a soft s.
Is the Portuguese alphabet the same as the Spanish one?
Almost. Portuguese has twenty six letters and Spanish has twenty seven, because ñ counts as a letter of its own, and Portuguese writes that sound as nh. The names of the letters are different, and so are the marks, since Portuguese has ã, õ and ç, which Spanish does not use.
Why do older Portuguese books spell words differently?
The 1990 agreement removed consonants that had stopped being pronounced, so acção became ação and óptimo became ótimo. Anything printed in Portugal before about 2012 will still use the older spellings.
Spelling your name down the phone
The practical test of all this. You will be asked to spell a surname, a street or an email address, and it happens early.
Two things make it easier. Learn the letter names as sounds rather than as a list, because you will be producing them one at a time under mild pressure. And learn the phrase for a double letter, dois esses for a double s, since Portuguese does not say the letter twice the way English does.
For the at sign in an email, Portugal says arroba. For a dot, ponto. For a hyphen, hífen.
If you want to practise the letters attached to real words rather than in isolation, the Learning Library is free and graded, and an A1 reading will put most of these sounds in front of you inside two minutes. Reading one aloud will do more for you than reciting the alphabet ever will.
And if you would like someone to listen while you spell your own name badly the first few times, I'm here to help :)
Nuno