The Portuguese alphabet

The Portuguese alphabet is, like that of almost every language of western Europe, an adaptation of the Latin alphabet. In its present form it has twenty-six letters, a count fixed for the whole Portuguese-speaking world by Base I of the 1990 Orthographic Agreement. Each letter exists in an upper-case and a lower-case form, and the conventional sequence — from a to z — governs the ordering of dictionaries, indexes and word-lists.

The twenty-six letters

The official order is as follows:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Five of these letters — a, e, i, o, u — normally stand for vowels; the rest stand for consonants. The h is a case apart: today it corresponds to no sound of its own, surviving only for etymological reasons (hoje “today”, homem “man”) or as part of a digraph (ch, lh, nh).

The names of the letters

Each letter has a traditional name, used when spelling out loud. The name of a letter must not be confused with its value (the sound it stands for in a word), since one and the same grapheme can have different values according to its position.

Letter	Name	Letter	Name
A a	á	N n	ene
B b	bê	O o	ó
C c	cê	P p	pê
D d	dê	Q q	quê
E e	é	R r	erre
F f	efe	S s	esse
G g	gê / guê	T t	tê
H h	agá	U u	u
I i	i	V v	vê
J j	jota	W w	dáblio / duplo vê
K k	capa / cá	X x	xis
L l	ele	Y y	ípsilon / i grego
M m	eme	Z z	zê

K, W and Y: the reinstated letters

The three letters k, w and y hold a special status. They belonged to the Latin alphabet and were used in older Portuguese, but the orthographic reforms of the early twentieth century banished them from ordinary writing: the official alphabet came to have only twenty-three letters, and k, w, y were confined to a few narrow contexts. The 1990 Orthographic Agreement restored the full count of twenty-six, but did not change their uses: they still appear only in special cases, never to spell native Portuguese words.

They are used, in particular:

• in foreign proper names and their derivatives — Kant > kantiano, Darwin > darwinismo, Byron > byroniano, Taylor > taylorista;
• in internationally accepted symbols, abbreviations and units — km (kilometre), kg (kilogram), W (watt), kW, yd (yard);
• in loanwords not yet adapted to Portuguese spelling — show, whisky, hobby.

Note that many words once written with these letters have, over time, been adapted to Portuguese: kilo became quilo, Kongo became Congo, Yperite became iperite. Where Portuguese genuinely takes a word in, it tends to reshape it to its own spelling.

Letters are not digraphs

Portuguese writes several sounds with digraphs — pairs of letters that stand for a single phonic unit. None of these is a letter of the alphabet, and so none has its own place in alphabetical ordering. The chief ones are ch [ʃ] , lh [ʎ] , nh [ɲ] , rr, ss, gu and qu; to these are added the vowel digraphs of nasality, such as am, an, em, en.

The cedilla (ç) is likewise not a separate letter but a c with a diacritic; it appears only before a, o and u (caçar “to hunt”, moço “lad”, açúcar “sugar”), never at the start of a word.

Alphabetical order and diacritics

In alphabetical ordering, accented letters do not form positions of their own: á, à, â, ã count as a, just as ç counts as c. The diacritics — the acute, the circumflex, the grave, the tilde and the cedilla — modify the sound or the stress, but add no letters to the alphabet. In a dictionary, then, acelga precedes açúcar, which precedes adega: ordering proceeds letter by letter, ignoring the accents for the purpose of sequence.