L’alfabeto Italiano: Your Simple Italian Alphabet Guide

The trouble with learning Italian means that you have to master the Italian alphabet by heart. And why by heart? Well, that’s because learning the alphabet by heart helps you understand the writing and the words of the language easier. But don’t worry, the Italian alphabet is really not that complicated.

Italian is a phonetic language and it has a very phonetic orthography, so the pronunciation is pretty much fixed. But, some of its letters can actually change in pronunciation under different conditions. For example, the letter G can both have a hard G and a soft G/J sound. Ga–, Go–, Gu-, Ghi–, or Ghe– are pronounced with a hard G, similar to the G sound in the English word gallery. While Gi– and Ge– are pronounced with a soft G, similar to the G sound in the English word gender. Hear the difference?

Pronunciation Guidelines

• “Gn” sounds more like the “Ny” pronunciation.
• “C” has a hard sound before A, O, U, and a soft sound before I and E.
• “H” is never pronounced at the beginning of a word (e.g., hotel = oh-tel).
• “S” is pronounced as Z when between two vowels (e.g., casa = ca-za).
• “Z” is often pronounced as "TZ" (e.g., pizza = pi-tza).