| Ñ (lower case ñ, Spanish: eñe, Phonetic Alphabet: /ˈeɲe/ "énye", pronunciation ) is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by placing a tilde (also referred to as virgulilla in Spanish) on top of an upper- or lowercase N. It became part of the Spanish alphabet in the eighteenth century when it was first formally defined, but it is also used in other languages such as Galician, Asturian, the Aragonese Grafía de Uesca, Basque, Chavacano, Filipino, Chamorro, Guarani, Quechua, Mapudungun, Mandinka, and Tetum alphabets, as well as in Latin transliteration of Tocharian and Sanskrit, where it represents [ɲ]. It represents [ŋ] in Crimean Tatar. In Breton and in Rohingya, it denotes nasalization of the preceding vowel.
Unlike many other letters that use diacritic marks (such as Ü in Spanish and German and Ç in French, Catalan and Portuguese), Ñ in Spanish, Galician, Basque, Asturian, Leonese, Guarani and Filipino is considered a letter in its own right, has its own name (in Spanish: eñe), and its own place in the alphabet (after N). Its alphabetical independence is similar to the English W, which historically came from a doubled V. |
