The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) reported through its website which decided to definitively exclude from the alphabet lthe signs ch and ll. The institution pointed out that in reality these signs are not letters but digraphs.
The entity recalled that the digraphs are sets of two letters or graphemes that represent a single phoneme. The RAE pointed out that the Spanish alphabet is thus reduced to the following 27 letters: a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, ñ, o, p , q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z.
“Spanish is thereby assimilated to the rest of the alphabetic writing languages, in which only simple signs are considered letters of the alphabet. However, in all of them there are combinations of graphemes to represent some of their phonemes”.
The institution warned that the elimination of the digraphs ch and ll from the inventory of letters of the alphabet does not mean, in any way, that they disappear from the graphic system of Spanish. In fact, these double signs will continue to be used as until now in the writing of Spanish words.
In the case of the digraph ch, it will be used in representation of the phoneme /ch/ (boy [chíko]) and in the digraph ll representing the fonema /ll/ or, for Yeísta speakers, from the phoneme /y/ (street [kálle, káye]). The novelty is simply that they are no longer counted among the letters of the alphabet.
“The decision to adopt the universal Latin alphabetical order was made in the X Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language, held in 1994. It has been applied since then in all academic works”, concluded the RAE.
