In English, n and ñ are classified alike.Īs symbols that indicate segmental speech, letters are associated with phonetics.

In Spanish, for instance, ñ is a separate letter, sorted after n. As elements of alphabets, letters have prescribed orders, although this too may vary by language. Letters have specific names associated with them, which may differ with language, dialect, and history. Z, for example, is usually called zed in all English-speaking countries except the US, where it is named zee. Some versions contain as few as twenty-one characters, some as many as thirty. The basic Roman alphabet is used by about one hundred languages, with slight variations. A letter is classed as either a consonant or a vowel, depending on how its sound is produced (vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y and w). Each letter corresponds to one or more sounds, and the letters are combined in the order of sounds to make words. The contemporary English-language alphabet, known as Roman style, consists of twenty-six letters. Written signs in other writing systems are called syllabograms (which denote a syllable) or logograms (which indicate a word or phrase). Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent, exact correspondence between letters and phonemes. It is a visual representation of the smallest unit of spoken sound. A letter is a grapheme (written character) in an alphabetic system of writing.

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