Spanish language

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Revision as of 19:37, 10 December 2006 by Xavi (talk | contribs) (adding some background on the spanish language)
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Spanish, the language of Spain and most of Latin America, is written in the Latin alphabet with several accented letters, all of which are included in the Latin-1 block of Unicode.

Although the term spanish (español) is frequently used, the correct name of the language is castelian (castellano). See "Names given to the Spanish language".

Full alphabet:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNÑOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnñopqrstuvwxyz

Some years ago, the Real Academia Española determined that the special 'composed' characters such as ch, ll, rr (which except for the double r, were all considered autonomous characters—ie: a, b, c, ch, d...) were 'discarded' and standardized into just a simple sequenciation. For further information you can see the wikipedia's article.

Special characters:

ÁÉÍÓÚÜ
áéíóúü

Special (punctuation) symbols:

¿¡ªº

Traditionally, dates are in the DD/MM/YY and numbers use the 9.999,99 format (period for thousands and coma for decimal).