Italian orthography

Italian orthography (the conventions used in writing Italian) uses 21 letters of the 26-letter Latin alphabet to write the Italian language. This article focuses on the writing of Standard Italian, based historically on the Florentine dialect, and not the other Italian dialects.

Written Italian is very regular and almost completely phonemic – having an almost one-to-one correspondence between letters (or sequences of letters) and sounds (or sequences of sounds). The main exceptions are that stress placement and vowel quality (for ⟨e⟩ and ⟨o⟩) are not notated, ⟨s⟩ and ⟨z⟩ may be voiced or not, ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ may represent vowels or semivowels, and a silent ⟨h⟩ is used in a very few cases other than the digraphs ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨gh⟩ (used for the hard ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ sounds before ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩).