Alphabet and Pronunciation

The Esperanto alphabet contains 28 letters — 5 vowels and 23 consonants:

Esperanto	ENGLISH	IPA	EXAMPLE
a	a	a	father
b	b	b	boat
c	ts	ʦ	mitts
ĉ	ch	ʧ	charming
d	d	d	deportation
e	e	e	wet
f	f	f	famous
g	g	g	gargantuan
ĝ	j	ʤ	general
h	h	h	homeward
ĥ	ch/kh	x	German Achtung
i	ee	i	teen
j	y	j	yodel
ĵ	zh	ʒ	treasure
k	k	k	kite
l	l	l	long
m	m	m	moat
n	n	n	nautical
o	o	o	olfactory
p	p	p	political
r	r	r	Spanish señora (with a trilled [r])
s	s	s	suspend
ŝ	sh	ʃ	shore
t	t	t	tank
u	oo	u	boot
ŭ	w	w	western
v	v	v	invasion
z	z	z	zither

When writing in media that cannot accommodate circumflexes and breves (oldschool message boards and such), the custom nowadays is to transcribe them with a following x: la cxehxa regxo ludas sxakon jxauxde instead of la ĉeĥa reĝo ludas ŝakon ĵaŭde.

Every vowel in Esperanto constitutes a separate syllable, even adjacent vowels:

In English, some vowels can combine with other vowels to form sounds pronounced as a single (or close to single) syllable, as in coin and couch. These combination vowel sounds are called diphthongs. In Esperanto, vowels never combine with other vowels, but with the consonants j or ŭ to produce one of eleven diphthongs — six “falling” (aj, ej, oj, uj, aŭ and eŭ) and five “rising” (ja, je, ji, jo, and ju)*.

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Tonic Stress

Without exception, words in Esperanto are stressed on the next-to-the-last syllable, as in fortuno [for-'tu-no] and mencii [men-'ʦi-i]. While this makes proper stress easy and unambiguous, English-speakers will need to take care not to stress familiar-looking words with traditional stress: opero (“opera”) is [o-'pe-ro], not ['o-pe-ro], Anglio (“England”) is [an-'gli-o], not ['an-gli-o], for example.

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