Other than in loanwords (e.g. hámster; hachís; hawaiano), the letter ‹h› is always silent in Spanish except in a few dialects that retain it as [h] or [x] (halar / jalar; Sáhara).[15]
↑ 1.01.11.21.3/b/, /d/, /ɡ/ and /ʝ/ are between fricatives and approximants ([β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞, ʝ̞]; represented here without the undertacks) in all places except after a pause, after an /n/ or /m/, or—in the case of /d/ and /ʝ/—after an /l/, in which contexts they are stops [b, d, g, ɟʝ], not dissimilar from English b, d, g, j (Martínez-Celdrán, Fernández-Planas & Carrera-Sabaté 2003:257-8).
↑The phoneme /f/ is often pronounced as [ɸ], with the lips touching each other rather than the front teeth.
↑ 4.04.14.24.3The nasal consonants/n, m, ɲ/ only contrast before vowels. Before consonants, they assimilate to the consonant's place of articulation. This is partially reflected in the orthography. Word-finally, only /n/ occurs.
↑ 5.05.1The rhotic consonants/ɾ/ ‹r› and /r/ ‹rr› only contrast between vowels. Otherwise, they are in complementary distribution as ‹r›, with [r] occurring word-initially, after /l/, /n/, and /s/, before consonants, and word-finally; [ɾ] is found elsewhere.
↑The marginal phonemes are found in loanwords, largely from Basque, English, and Nahuatl.
↑In many dialects, /ʃ/ is replaced by [tʃ] or [s]; e.g. show[tʃou]~[sou].
↑The Spanish /e/ doesn't quite line up with any English vowel, though the nearest equivalents are the vowel of play (for most English dialects) and the vowel of bed; the Spanish vowel is usually articulated at a point between the two.
↑The Spanish /o/ doesn't quite line up with any English vowel, though the nearest equivalents are the vowel of coat (for most English dialects) and the vowel of raw; the Spanish vowel is usually articulated at a point between the two.
↑In Spanish, the semivowels [w] and [j] can be combined with vowels to form rising diphthongs (e.g. cielo, cuadro). Falling diphthongs though; e.g. aire, rey, auto, are transcribed with /i/ and /u/.
↑Some speakers may pronounce word initial [w] with an epenthetic/g/; e.g. Huila[ˈgwila]~[ˈwila].
Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio; Fernández-Planas, Ana Ma.; Carrera-Sabaté, Josefina (2003), "Castilian Spanish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 33 (2): 255–259