Pronunciation
The Italian alphabet really only has 21 letters, the other 5
that occur in the English alphabet (highlighted in yellow below)
are used only rarely to spell mainly foreign words. Click on each
letter to read how it is pronounced. Also, there are some letter
combinations that are worth noting, which are also indicated below.
| a | b | c | d | e | f |
| g | h | i | j | k | l |
| m | n | o | p | q | r |
| s | t | u | v | w | x |
| y | z |
| sc | gli | gn | diphthongs |
As for accents, there are really only two types of accents used in Italian: the grave accent ( ` ) and the acute accent ( ´ ). Accents in Italian, though, are not used very much. Usually they are only used when the last vowel in a word is stressed.
So what's the difference between grave and acute accents? For e's and o's, the difference is pronunciation, but for the rest of the vowels, there is no difference. There are actually different conventions on using accents, but I will use the following modern convention: acute accent ( ´ ) on closed e and closed o, and grave accent ( ` ) on open e and open o as well as a, i, and u.