alfabeto italiano
The Italian alphabet has 21 native letters; j, k, w, x and y appear only in foreign words. Spelling is very regular, and double consonants are pronounced longer.
Tap a letter to hear it; the small ▶ plays the example word. Practice mode hides names and sounds until you tap a card.
These five letters are used only in loanwords, foreign names and a few old spellings. With them the full alphabet has 26 letters.
Groups of letters that spell one sound. They are not separate letters of the alphabet.
Italian spelling is very regular: every vowel is pronounced, vowels keep their value, and h is always silent. Once you know how c, g and sc behave before different vowels, you can read almost any word aloud.
C and g are hard (k, g) before a, o, u and soft (ch, j) before e, i. An h keeps them hard: chi, che, ghi, ghe. An unstressed i keeps them soft before a, o, u and is itself not pronounced: ciao, giorno (day), giallo (yellow).
Double consonants are held longer, and the difference changes meaning: pala (shovel) and palla (ball), caro (dear) and carro (cart), nono (ninth) and nonno (grandfather). Say them with a slight pause, as in the English “bookcase”.
A written accent is required only on a stressed final vowel: città (city), perché (why, because), caffè (coffee), più (more). On e and o it can also show a closed (é, ó) or open (è, ò) sound. Accented vowels are not separate letters.
Stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable (amico, pizza), but many words stress an earlier one (tavolo, macchina). The stress is written only when it falls on the last syllable, so it often has to be learned with the word.
Audio is synthetic speech generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech (Chirp 3: HD voices). Letter inventory checked against Unicode CLDR.