What's the Italian alphabet like?

The standard Italian alphabet contains only 21 letters.
You may well have to spell out your name and perhaps your address in Italian. Here is the alphabet and how to pronounce it

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What's significant about the Italian alphabet?

• Missing letters

  The following letters don’t appear in the Italian alphabet as they’re not used in Italian words, just in foreign loan words:
   J - i lunga
   K - cappa
   W - vu doppia / vi doppia
   X - ics
   Y - i greca / ipsilon

• More vowel sounds than letters

  The alphabet has five vowels:  a, e, i, o, u

  There are two pronunciations for e and o, which change the meaning of the words:
   e - and
   è - is
   Nono - ninth
   nonno - grandfather

• Consonants

  The Italian alphabet has only 16 consonants and most of them are pronounced as they are in English. So, what’s different?

  H isn’t pronounced at the beginning of words, so words like
   hanno, they have and  anno, year, are pronounced exactly the same

  R is rolled with a trill in the front of the mouth:  pizzeria

  C before e or i sounds like the English ‘ch’:   cena, dinner
  The Italian ch sounds like ‘k’:  chilo, kilo

  G before e or i has a soft ‘gee’ sound:  giacca, jacket, but
  gh sounds like a hard ‘g’:  ghirlanda, garland

  S can be pronounced ‘s’ as in  sì, yes, but when it’s between two vowels, it’s pronounced ‘z’ as in  sorpresa, surprise

  A double consonant is pronounced twice as long as a single one:
   sete - thirst
   sette - seven

  Other sounds include gl as in  tagliatelle roughly pronounced as the 'li' in 'million', or gn, as in  ognora, always, roughly pronounced as the 'ni' in 'onion'

• Accents

  Words with the stress on the last syllable carry a written grave accent:
   città - city
   caffè - coffee
   università - university

  Very few carry an acute accent except é, e.g.
   perché, why/because

  Some words have the same spelling but are stressed on a different syllable:
   ancora - again
   ancora - anchor

• Email and website conventions

  When giving an email or website address the conventions are:
   @ chiocciola
   . punto , dot
   / barra, forward slash
   - trattino, hyphen