This post aims to teach you the Portuguese Alphabet with sounds. It is a short, simple guide of how to spell the letters that constitute the alphabet and you can hear all of them by clicking the arrow next to each letter. I hope you enjoy it!
But before let me give you a bit of background.
The Portuguese Alphabet
Between 2009 and 2012, the New Orthographic Agreement of 1990, celebrated among the Portuguese Speaking Countries, has come to life and it is now being used by all these countries. Since then, the Portuguese Alphabet is composed by 26 letters, including k, y and w. Before this agreement there were only 23 letters, but since k, y and w are often used in Brazil and African speaking countries when writing different words, it was decided that they should also be included. This alphabet is based on the Latin one and its sounds are magical. Want to hear them?
In the table below, you can see the letter in upper and in lowercase, its normal spelling and finally its sound in IPA – International Phonetic Alphabet.
My European Portuguese Speech Course focuses on pronunciation and is perfect if you want to go into more detail.
Check it out:
A/a –> á –> /a/, /ɐ/, /ə/
B/b –> bê –> /b/
C/c –> cê –>/k/, /s/
D/d –> dê –> /d/
E/e –> é –> /e/, /ɛ/, /i/
F/f –> efe –>/f/
G/g –> gê –> /g/, /ʒ/
H/h –> agá –> —
I/i –> í –> /i/
J/j –> jóta –> /ʒ/
K/k –> capa/ca –> /k/
L/l –> éle –> /l/, /u̯/
M/m –> éme –> /m/, /~/
N/n –> éne –> /n/, /~/
O/o –> ó –> /o/, /ɔ/, /u/
P/p –> pê –> /p/
Q/q –> quê –> /k/
R/r –> érre –> /ʁ/, /ɾ/
S/s –> ésse –> /s/, /z/, /ʃ/
T/t –> tê –> /t/
U/u –> ú –> /u/
V/v –> vê –> /v/
W/w –> dábliu –> /u/, /v/
X/x –> xis –> /ʃ/, /ks/, /s/, /z/
Y/y –> ípsilon –> /i/
Z/z –> zê –> /z/, /ʃ/
Be aware that these are only the neutral sounds of each letter. If you want to know more about the different pronunciation that each letter can have, depending on the context, you can check it in more detail in my Portuguese pronunciation guide.
Please also bear in mind that Brazilian Portuguese, as well as African Portuguese, have slightly different neutral pronunciations of some of the letters. However, these dissimilarities are quite small and you will not notice a big difference. In terms of its pronunciation in other contexts, however, letters can sound very different in each Portuguese variant. If you want to see some of the differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, for example, please check it here.
You can also check out the following YouTube video, where I am speaking about this topic:
If you want to be informed about new videos, make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
And this is it!
Is the spelling of the letters similar in your language or totally different? Do you have difficulties with the European Portuguese spelling?
wI hope that you enjoyed this small post about the Portuguese Alphabet With the respective sounds. If you have any questions, please email me or leave a comment in the comments section below.
See you in the next post!
Beijinhos,
Mia.
OLA, BOA TARDE MIA, IT’S EXTRAORDINARY POST SENT TO ME BY YOU.
I’M SPEECHLESS TO SAY SOMETHING RELATING TO THIS.
ALL I CAN SAY IS BLESSINGS TO LIVE WITH HAPPINESS, PEACE & PROSPERITY.
WITH BEIJINHOS.
NURE.
BANGLADESH.
Muito obrigada!
Mia
DEAR MIA, BOA NOITE,
IT’S REALLY AWESOME HOW TO TEACH US EFFECTIVELY TO GET THE BETTER OF THE ALPHABETS IN EASIER WAY.
BLESS YOU EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE GET BETTER. OBRIGADO.
ATE A PROXIMA.
NURE.
BANGLADESH.
Muito obrigada!
Mia
So useful! now I know why people have problems understanding me when I was spelling my name over the phone, the R sound is different to Brazilian portugese`!
Ahah! I am glad you found it useful and that now you will be spelling your name “right” in Portuguese =)
Sandip Kaur
Hello Mia, I’m james from India & want to learn portuguese to work in Angola. I saw your website & heared some audios, which help to learn portuguese easily. But unfortunately, i’m not able to pay for whole audio because i have not enough money. I just completed my study & got my first job to work in Angola, so is there another way to get audios to learn…? Pls help if you can.
Thanks
James
Hi James!
Thank you for your message =)
At the moment my courses are with 15% off for the bundle A1 + A2. So maybe this is a price that you can pay?
Let me know!
Beijinhos,
Mia.
At long last! I have been meaning to look up the Portuguese alphabet because while I figured out most of the letters, a few stumped me – and now I know why! H, J, K, Q, W, Y – I now have them down (a good thing, given that my first name has two H’s in it, and my last name has both a J and a Y in it – spelling them out for admin purposes will now be a lot easier!). THANK YOU!
Hi Shahnaz,
I am happy that my article was helpful to you! 🙂
All the best,
Mia
Hi Mia,
What a great article, I can feel your passion teaching Portuguese!
One of my dreams is to learn Portuguese. It’s a beautiful language! Your article provides useful information, and I’ll already do these exercises on my keyboard today. Since my first language is French, will it not be too complicated for me to learnPortuguese?
Thank you very much for this excellent post!
Hi Daniella,
Thank you very much for your comment. I am happy that you liked the article.
In fact, having French as first language is an advantage when learning Portuguese. Both belong to the Romance languages and this makes it much easier when you study Portuguese.
I hope you will come back more often to my website, as I am adding more and more material for European Portuguese.
You can always follow your dream and just start learning 🙂
I would suggest you to check out this post that I wrote: Best way to learn European Portuguese
Hopefully see you soon!
Beijinhos,
Mia.
Hi Mia
Not that I would like to learn Portuguese but I found it interesting the the way the sound their alphabet compared to us.
You could also have added a few more images so that your article doesn’t look uninteresting to the eye. Colour always bring more attention to your webpage.
God bless
Naomi i
Hi Naomi!
Thanks for your comment.
Let me tell you that maybe you would like to learn Portuguese, if you found the alphabet interesting =)
Maybe you should give it a try =)
Thanks for the feedback about the pictures, I am constantly improving and updating my website and feedback is welcome!
Hope you come back and take a look at more materials and posts I am always uploading.
Regards,
Mia
Hey Mia,
That’s a brilliant Idea for learning how to pronounce better. I was actually playing the alphabet letters a few times over trying to copy your phonetic tone and expression too.
Plus I had no Idea there were only 23 letters in the Portuguese alphabet so recently!
I’ve a lot of practicing to do – but at least I have some good material to do it with .
Thanks
Hey Tony!
Thank you for your comment.
Yes, it is quite interesting that we only had 23 letters. This is because we do not have a lot of words that start with W, or K, or Y..we only have foreign words. In Brazil and some African countries, you can find words starting with these letter and since we are trying to even the Portuguese throughout all the Portuguese speaking countries, we now adopted all of the letters as official =)
I am glad you found the audios helpful. Listening and repeating is an excellent way of getting the pronunciation right! Keep up the good job!
Please keep coming back to my website, as I am always posting new things!
Kind Regards,
Mia
I really appreciate
Hi Roheel,
thank you very much for your feedback =)
Kind regards
Mia