Since November 28, 2010 the Spanish Alphabet has changed dramatically, 2 of 29 letters have disappeared. An international summit of 22 academies from 22 Spanish speaking countries is reducing it to 27 letters (the English alphabet plus Ñ), removing CH and LL from the alphabet. Additional changes have been made to the names of different letters.
The initiated a set of changes in many aspects of Spanish Language. of the Association of Spanish Language Academies in Guadalajara (Mexico) had the mission to approve the changes and to make them official everywhere. The idea was to unify and to simplify the Spanish spelling and to clarify some aspects of the Spanish grammar. When this is affecting some 500 million Spanish speakers, it has to be a big event and a headache for thousands of Spanish teachers and students.
The names of some letters have been clarified or changed: • B becomes be • V becomes uve instead of ve, to avoid confusion with B • Y becomes ye instead of i griega • W becomes uve doble instead of doble ve.
The CH and LL ex-letters are keeping their pronunciation but they loose their special place in the Spanish alphabet and in dictionaries. CH used to be the letter after C, and now, words starting with CH will be included in alphabetical order between the words starting with C. In my 40,000 words dictionary the letters CH and LL are definitely distinguished. I have five pages of words starting with CH. And only one page of words starting with LL. But if I buy a new dictionary I’ll have to search for this words between the other words starting with C and L. As somebody mentioned, the move was taken to simplify dictionaries, to aid translation and computer standardization and to make Spanish more compatible with English and other languages who use a Latin alphabet.
Another approved change makes the letter Q to loose some power: words of foreign origin no longer use the letter Q. For example, this is how you have to write correctly the names of some countries: • Irak instead of Iraq (Q becomes K) • Catar instead of Qatar (Q becomes C)
To reconsider and to change the letter Q into K is especially surprising from my point of view because K, which exist almost exclusively in imported words, such as kilómetro and kilo(gramo), in the past was hardly considered part of the Spanish alphabet.
Some Spanish Academies once have considered even the RR (erre doble – doble R) as a separate letter because RR is pronounced a bit longer than R (ere).
Another changes have been made to accents and hyphens. Who can explain better those changes than !?!