A bilingual alphabet chart looks, from across the room, like one chart. Up close it is two — and the differences are the point. The English alphabet has 26 letters. The Portuguese alphabet has 26 as well, though it took a formal treaty between eight countries to settle which ones. The Spanish alphabet has 27, and until 2010 it had 29. A nursery wall that carries El Abecedario beside The Alphabet, or O Alfabeto beside either, is not decorative bilingualism. It is a small archive of decisions three language academies made about which shapes belong in a language, and when.
How did we get here?
1713: The Real Academia Española is founded, and the Spanish alphabet acquires an official custodian
Before 1713, the Spanish alphabet was whatever the printer set. Scribes disagreed on whether to write *philosophía* or *filosofía*, whether the letter *Ç* still belonged, whether *V* and *U* were separate marks or a stylistic choice. There was no register of decisions, because there was no registrar.
The Real Academia Española was founded in Madrid that year by a group of noblemen and scholars gathered around Juan Manuel Fernández Pacheco, the Marquess of Villena. Its motto — *limpia, fija y da esplendor*, cleans, fixes and gives splendour — announced the ambition: an alphabet as an object to be maintained. By the middle of the eighteenth century the RAE had published its first dictionary and its first orthography, and Spanish had, for the first time, an authoritative letter count.
The shape that emerged was strange to modern eyes. The Spanish alphabet the RAE codified included *CH* and *LL* as independent letters, sitting between *C* and *D*, between *L* and *M*, in dictionaries and school primers. It included *Ñ*, which nobody was going to argue with. And it treated *W* and *K* as foreign visitors — present in the alphabet but tagged as loans.
This is the alphabet a nursery chart drawn in 1950 would have honoured. El Abecedario at that date would have carried 29 letters, and the child pointing at *L* would have been expected to point again, separately, at *LL*, and to name it *elle*, the way *ñ* is named *eñe*. The letter existed because the academy said it did.
1911: Portugal's orthographic reform separates written Portuguese from Brazilian usage, and the alphabets drift
Portugal did not have a Real Academia. It had, from 1779, the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, but the academy took a lighter hand with letters and a heavier hand with vocabulary. Portuguese spelling was, well into the nineteenth century, a matter of typographer taste and etymological loyalty. Writers spelled *pharmácia* because the Greek root demanded a *ph*. They spelled *lyrica* with a *y* for the same reason.
In 1911, the young Portuguese Republic decreed a full orthographic reform. Greek letters were retired from Portuguese words that no longer needed them. *Ph* became *f*, *th* became *t*, silent consonants were struck out. It was a modernising gesture — Portugal wanted a schoolable spelling — and it worked, in Portugal.
Brazil did not adopt it. The Brazilian Academy of Letters, founded in 1897, had its own view of which reforms were welcome and which were metropolitan overreach. For most of the twentieth century the two countries wrote the same language in visibly different ways: Brazilian children learned *ação* while Portuguese children still, for a period, learned *acção*; Brazilian *fato* stood beside Portuguese *facto*.
The alphabets, technically, did not diverge. Both were 23 letters, treating *K*, *W* and *Y* as foreign. But the two orthographies made a bilingual chart for a Portuguese-speaking family into a small political statement. A studio drawing O Alfabeto in São Paulo in 1980 was drawing a different chart from one in Lisbon, even if the letters themselves matched — the words beside each letter, the illustrations, the spellings underneath them, were coded to a country. This is the disunity that a later treaty would try, imperfectly, to close.
1990: The Portuguese-Language Orthographic Agreement is signed in Lisbon, aiming to reunify the alphabet across countries
On 16 December 1990, delegates from Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe met in Lisbon and signed the *Acordo Ortográfico da Língua Portuguesa*. East Timor acceded later, after its independence. Eight countries in total agreed, in principle, that Portuguese would be spelled the same way in each.
The agreement is a curious document. It runs to a hundred pages and it changes, in practice, perhaps 1.6 per cent of the words in the Brazilian variant and about 1.3 per cent of those in the European variant. The bulk of it is small: dropping silent consonants in Portugal (*acção* becomes *ação*), altering hyphenation rules, retiring the trema. But at the alphabet level it does one large thing. It formally admits the letters *K*, *W* and *Y*, which had spent the twentieth century as tolerated foreigners, into the Portuguese alphabet as full members. The count rises from 23 to 26.
The politics were slower than the treaty. Portugal and Brazil ratified at different times. Angola has still, as of the mid-2020s, not ratified. Purists on both sides of the Atlantic wrote furious columns arguing the agreement was either a Brazilian imposition on European Portuguese or a Portuguese imposition on Brazilian Portuguese — both true, in a sense, and both beside the point.
For a chart-maker, the 1990 treaty is the reason O Alfabeto in the studio's catalogue looks the way it does. Twenty-six panels, with *K*, *W* and *Y* sitting quietly among the rest, illustrated with words a child in Luanda or Lisbon or Salvador would recognise. A pre-1990 chart of the same alphabet would have been shorter, and would have felt, to a parent buying it in 2026, incomplete.
2009: The Agreement enters force in Brazil, and K, W and Y are formally readmitted to the Portuguese alphabet
The 1990 agreement had a long fuse. Signed in Lisbon, it required ratification by each signatory and a transitional period during which both old and new spellings would be tolerated. Brazil ratified in 1995. The reform actually entered force on 1 January 2009, with a six-year transition (later extended) during which schools and publishers were expected to migrate.
The moment mattered practically. From 2009 on, Brazilian textbooks began printing the alphabet as 26 letters. State education secretariats issued guidance. Editorial houses updated style manuals. Rebordosa was one spelling, then another. A generation of Brazilian schoolchildren who had learned the alphabet as *A, B, C… J, L, M* — skipping *K* — was, in the space of one school year, presented with a longer sequence.
There is a domestic dimension to this that a nursery wall registers. Parents in Brazil in the early 2010s often owned an alphabet chart from their own childhood — 23 letters — and hung a new chart for their child — 26 letters. Two charts, both correct, both Portuguese, ten years apart, differing by three letters. The difference between them is not a design choice. It is the shape of a treaty.
The studio's O Alfabeto is drawn to the post-2009 standard. *K* is illustrated with *kiwi*, *W* with *waffle*, *Y* with *yoga* or *ioga* depending on the panel — words that would have felt like intruders in a 1980 chart and feel entirely native now. A child looking at the wall today will never know these three letters were, within their grandparents' lifetime, considered outside the alphabet.
2010: The RAE removes CH and LL as independent letters, shrinking the Spanish alphabet to 27
The Spanish alphabet moved in the opposite direction — it got shorter. In November 2010, the Real Academia Española and the twenty-two associated academies of the Spanish-speaking world approved a new *Ortografía de la lengua española*. Among its resolutions was the formal downgrading of *CH* and *LL* from independent letters to digraphs — two-letter combinations that make one sound but that no longer occupy their own slot in the alphabet.
The RAE had been signalling this for years. The 1994 edition of the *Diccionario* already alphabetised words containing *CH* and *LL* as if they were sequences of two letters, tucking *chico* between *cerveza* and *cielo*. What the 2010 decision did was make the sequence official. The Spanish alphabet, from 2010 onward, contains 27 letters: 26 shared with English, plus *Ñ*.
The decision was contested. Language purists in Spain and Latin America wrote that removing *LL* was a small act of cultural amnesia — that the sound *elle* is distinct in most Spanish dialects, that the letter carried grammatical and pedagogical weight. The RAE's response was pragmatic: alphabets are indices, and a two-letter digraph in a one-letter slot is a filing error. It did not change how the sound is written or pronounced. It changed how the alphabet counts.
For the studio's El Abecedario, this is the reference date. The chart is drawn to 27 letters, ends at *Z*, includes *Ñ* between *N* and *O*, and treats *CH* and *LL* the way English treats *SH* and *TH* — real sounds without alphabet seats. A chart made in 2005 would have had 29 panels. A chart made now has 27. The two would sit uneasily on the same wall.
What It All Means: Drawing two alphabets for one nursery wall
The reason we make three alphabet charts — El Abecedario, O Alfabeto, The Alphabet — as separate objects rather than one merged chart is that the three alphabets are not the same. They agree on most letters and disagree, in small legible ways, on the edges. Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-seven. A treaty in Lisbon and a resolution in Madrid, both within the last two generations. A parent choosing two of the three to hang on a wall is choosing which pair of edges the child will see, and when.
There is a design consequence. Two alphabet charts side by side should be drawn to the same grid, the same letter weight, the same illustration palette — otherwise the eye reads them as unrelated posters and the bilingual point is lost. The studio's three alphabets share a system: same letterform proportions, same soft pastels, same illustration density per panel. Hung together, they look like one chart with a subtitle. Read carefully, they hold different histories. The English *K* is a letter that has never left. The Portuguese *K* is a letter readmitted in 2009. The Spanish alphabet ends where the English alphabet ends, but with a letter added; the Portuguese alphabet ends where the English one ends, with no addition. The gaps are small and they are the entire point.
This piece does not cover which language a bilingual child should learn to read first — that is a family decision and not a design one, and we are not qualified on the developmental side. It does not cover the differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese vocabulary, which are large but do not touch the alphabet. And it does not cover the alphabets of the other languages we make charts for — Italian, French, German — which have their own dated decisions and deserve their own timelines. Each of those is a different wall.
FAQ
Which two languages does the studio recommend for a bilingual alphabet wall?
Whichever two the household speaks. The three charts we draw — El Abecedario, O Alfabeto and The Alphabet — pair equally well in any combination. The most common pairing we ship is English with Spanish or English with Portuguese, but a Spanish-Portuguese wall for a Brazilian-Argentine family, or a Portuguese-English wall for a Portuguese family in London, is drawn to the same grid and hangs with the same visual weight. The pairing follows the family, not the market.
Do the charts share the same illustrations for each letter?
No, and that is deliberate. *A* in English is illustrated with an apple; *A* in Portuguese with an *abacaxi*; *A* in Spanish with an *árbol* or an *avión*. Using the same picture for all three would make the charts feel like translations of a single object rather than three alphabets in their own right. Each letter is illustrated with a friendly word native to the language, so the child associates the letter with a word they will actually hear at home.
Why is the Spanish alphabet 27 letters and the Portuguese 26?
Both are the result of academy decisions in the last two decades. The Portuguese alphabet added *K*, *W* and *Y* under the 1990 Orthographic Agreement, taking the count from 23 to 26 when the reform entered force in Brazil in 2009. The Spanish alphabet subtracted *CH* and *LL* as independent letters in 2010, shrinking from 29 to 27. The remaining extra letter in Spanish is *Ñ*, which is not in Portuguese or English. That is the entire count difference.
Are CH and LL still on Spanish alphabet charts made today?
Not as independent panels. Since the RAE's 2010 decision, *CH* and *LL* are treated as digraphs — two-letter sounds — the way English treats *SH* and *TH*. Our El Abecedario chart runs from *A* to *Z* with *Ñ* inserted between *N* and *O*, and does not give *CH* or *LL* their own slot. The sounds are still Spanish; they are just no longer separate letters. A pre-2010 chart in a grandparent's house may show them, which is a good conversation, not a mistake.
What size should two charts be if we hang them side by side?
The studio's rule of thumb for two alphabet charts is that the pair should read as a single object from the door of the room. In practice that means each chart at A3 or larger, with a gap between them of one-quarter the width of a single chart — enough to separate them, not enough to break the reading. Hanging height is calibrated to the child, not the adult: the centre of the pair should sit at the seated child's eye level, roughly 90 to 110 cm from the floor.
How long will an alphabet chart stay useful on a nursery wall?
Longer than most nursery decor. A child who learns the alphabet at three is still using the chart at five for reading, at six for spelling, and at seven for the second language they did not learn first. Our charts are drawn without licensed characters or age-tagged illustrations for this reason — the failure mode of most nursery art is that it visibly ages the room by 18 months. An alphabet chart in a language the family speaks is one of the few nursery objects that survives to primary school.
Does the studio sell the three charts as a set or individually?
Each chart is sold individually from the /shop/ page and priced as a single print. A bilingual pair is two prints, chosen by the family, not a bundled product. We have found that families rarely want all three languages; they want the two they use, in the sizes that fit the wall they have. Selling them separately keeps the choice with the household. Framing and hanging guidance for pairs is included with any order of two matching charts.
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