The Spanish language
and how it is written

Where Spanish ranks

Spanish is the 4th most-spoken language in the world by total speakers ^[1,2]. Here it is among its neighbours in the ranking, on one scale.

“How are you?” in Spanish

The design of Latin alphabet

An alphabet: separate letters for consonants and vowels, written left to right. The Romans took it from a Greek alphabet by way of the Etruscans^[6], and it is now the most widely used script in the world^[7]. Most languages that use it add marks or extra letters for their own sounds^[8].

Alphabet. One letter for each consonant and vowel.

Kind

Alphabet

Direction

Left to right

Took shape

By the 7th century BCE in central Italy

Line of descent

Egyptian hieroglyphs → Proto-Sinaitic → Phoenician → Greek → Etruscan → Latin

Traditional surface

Parchment and vellum

Own digits

No — uses the Western 0–9

Also writes

English Englishfrançais Frenchportuguês PortugueseBahasa Indonesia IndonesianDeutsch GermanNaijá Nigerian PidginTiếng Việt VietnameseKiswahili SwahiliHausa HausaTürkçe TurkishTagalog Tagalog (Filipino)ꦧꦱꦗꦮ Javaneseitaliano ItalianYorùbá Yoruba

• Two alphabets in one

  Capitals come from the square capitals the Romans carved in stone^[9]; small letters come from Carolingian minuscule, a rounded book hand standardised in Charlemagne's empire in the late 8th century^[10]. Writing with both is called case, and software has to know which pairs belong together^[8].

• Built to be extended

  Rather than inventing new letters, most languages bolt marks onto old ones: é, ñ, ç, ş, ọ. Unicode encodes many as single letters and also as a base letter plus a combining mark, so the same word can be stored two ways^[8].

• Gothic or roman

  Through the Middle Ages much of Europe wrote and printed in blackletter. German kept its Fraktur style for everyday print far longer than its neighbours, until the 20th century^[11].

• Ñ began as a space-saver

  Medieval scribes shortened a double n to a single n with a mark above it; Latin annus became Spanish año, and the shorthand became a letter of its own^[5].

• Telling the reader in advance

  Because a Spanish question can look exactly like a statement until the end, ¿ warns the reader to change their intonation from the first word^[4].

Explore the letters

Spanish's relatives among the 38

Spanish belongs to the Indo-European family (Romance). These are the other languages with 50 million or more speakers in the same family; the closest — in the same branch — come first.

• françaisFrenchSame branch: Romance · 334M
• portuguêsPortugueseSame branch: Romance · 269M
• italianoItalianSame branch: Romance · 66M
• EnglishEnglishGermanic · 1.5B
• हिन्दीHindiIndo-Aryan · 611M
• বাংলাBengaliIndo-Aryan · 274M
• اُردُوUrduIndo-Aryan · 246M
• русскийRussianBalto-Slavic · 210M
• DeutschGermanGermanic · 133M
• मराठीMarathiIndo-Aryan · 99M
• پنجابیWestern PunjabiIndo-Aryan · 90M
• فارسیPersian (Iranian)Iranian · 82M
• ગુજરાતીGujaratiIndo-Aryan · 62M
• भोजपुरीBhojpuriIndo-Aryan (Bihari) · 53M

Spanish across the hub

The main page compares all 38 languages. Each link opens it on Spanish.

• Preview it in the explorer →with all 38 side by side
• Hear it in the voice tour →“How are you?” in every language, spoken in turn
• Trace its script's family tree →from the first alphabets and Chinese oracle bones
• Compare its digits →ten ways to write 0–9
• See its share of speakers →an interactive breakdown by script, family and region

Sources

1. Ethnologue — What are the top 200 most spoken languages? (2026)
2. Wikipedia — List of languages by total number of speakers (Ethnologue 2026 figures, retrieved October 2026)
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Spanish language
4. Wikipedia — Upside-down question and exclamation marks
5. Wikipedia — Ñ
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Alphabet (writing)
7. Omniglot — Latin alphabet
8. The Unicode Standard 17.0, chapter 7: Europe-I (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic)
9. Omniglot — Classical Latin alphabet
10. Omniglot — Carolingian minuscule
11. Omniglot — Fraktur
12. Omniglot — Phoenician alphabet
13. Omniglot — Useful phrases in Spanish

Checked October 25, 2026. Speaker numbers are Ethnologue's 2026 estimates, which count each language separately (Arabic and Chinese varieties are listed one by one). Maps shade whole countries, not regions within them. Found an error? Tell us.