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The Esperanto Alphabet

The Esperanto alphabet has 28 letters.  They are the same as our 26 letters, omitting Q, W, X, and Y, and adding six modified letters, Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, and Ŭ.  Here are their pronunciations:

The number of syllables in a word equals the number of vowel-letters (A, E, I, O, and U).  Note that Ŭ is a consonant, not a vowel.  The accent is always on the next-to-last syllable.  Every letter is pronounced, even in combinations where one of them might be silent in English:  la knabo = the boy (pronounced somewhat like “lock nobbo”); la psalmo = the psalm (pronounced somewhat like “lopp salmo”).  Note that in practice, both consonants in these examples should actually be pronounced at the beginning of the second word, and not split between words.

The letter C is pronounced something like English TS, but the two sounds are not split between syllables.  For example paco (peace) sounds somewhat like “POT so”, but should actually be pronounced more like “PA tso”.  This sound is rare in English, but does occur occasionally; most people pronounce “Mozart” and “pizza” with the correct Esperanto C-sound.

The letter G always has the “hard” sound of English G in “go”.  The “soft” sound of G in “general” is represented by the accented letter Ĝ.

The letter Ĥ is something like the English H, but rougher, like the Scottish CH in “loch” or German CH in “ach!”, Spanish J, or Russian X.

The letter J is pronounced like English Y, or exactly like a German J.  After a vowel, it forms a diphthong, AJ, EJ, OJ, or UJ.  AJ sounds like IE in “tie”; EJ sounds like some people’s pronunciation of EY in “they” (that is, it is a definite glide from an E sound to an I sound); OJ sounds OY in “boy”; the sound of UJ does not occur in English, but is similar to the OOEY in “fooey”, but pronounced all in one syllable, rather than in two.

The letter Ĵ represents the rarer sound of S in “leisure” or “pleasure”, or the second G in some people’s pronunciation of “garage”.

The letter N is always pronounced like the N in “never”, and never like N in “finger”.  There is no NG sound in Esperanto, so the word lango = tongue sounds somewhat like “LAWN-go”.

The letter R is pronounced in many different ways in different languages.  In French, it’s pronounced farther back in the throat than in English; about the same place you would produce a G-sound.  In German, it’s about the same, but sometimes rougher.  In English, it’s pronounced farther forward, and in Spanish, Italian and Japanese, it’s pronounced with the tip of the tongue.  This last pronunciation is the correct one for Esperanto.  It’s close to the D in English “a wad o’ gum”, pronounced rather quickly and carelessly.

The letter S is always voiceless, like the S in “cats”, never voiced, like the S in “dogs”.

The letter Ŝ sounds like SH in “shine” or CH in “chamois”.

The letter Ŭ technically occurs only after the vowels A and E to form diphthongs.  The word naŭ (nine) sounds very much like the English word “now”.  The sound of EŬ doesn’t occur in normal English, but is the sound of E in “let”, followed quickly (that is, in the same syllable) by an OO sound.  The combination sounds like the name of the letter “L” as pronounced by someone who has trouble making an L-sound, such as Elmer Fudd or Tweety Pie.

The names of the letters are formed by adding -o to the consonants, and letting the vowels stand as their own names, so the alphabet is recited a, bo, co, ĉo, do, e, fo, go, ĝo, ho, ĥo, i, jo, ĵo, ko, lo, mo, no, o, po, ro, so, ŝo, to, u, ŭo, vo, zo.  The name of Ŭ is a bit problematic, as the letter should never begin a word, so the letter is sometimes called u-hoko (u-hook).  The foreign letters Q, W, X, and Y have names, too, so that foreign words can be spelled out loud:  Q is kuo; W is duobla-vo, germana-vo, or vovo; X is ikso; and Y is ipsilono.

Sometimes, it can be a bit tricky to write Esperanto words with typewriters, computers, and other machines which do not have its six unique letters.  On the Internet, this is often accomplished by using pairs of characters instead.  The circumflexed letters are sometimes written with a bare circumflex (^) in front of them, sometimes after, or with an apostrophe, backquote, or the letter H or X following.

Eventually, all computers will use Unicode, which has virtually all symbols used for writing all languages, and this will no longer be a problem.

This table gives the common replacements for Esperanto’s accented letters as often found on the Internet:

It’s easier to use the proper letters in World-Wide Web pages; we just use the Unicode characters expressed as “character entities” in the text of the HTML file, and for most browsers on most computers, the proper Esperanto letters and punctuation marks appear as if by magic.  This is the system I use on this web site, by the way.

Questions or suggestions?  Please write, and I’ll get back to you.