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There are important variations among the regions of Spain and throughout Spanish-speaking America. In Spain the Castilian dialect pronunciation is commonly taken as the national standard (although the characteristic weak pronouns usage or la?smo of this dialect is deprecated).

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Spanish has three second-person singular pronouns: t?, usted, and in some parts of Latin America, vos (the use of this form is called voseo). Generally speaking, t? and vos are informal and used with friends (though in Spain vos is considered a highly exalted archaism that is now confined to liturgy). Usted is universally regarded as the formal form, and is used as a mark of respect, as when addressing one's elders or strangers. The pronoun vosotros is the plural form of t? in most of Spain, although in the Americas (and some particular southern-Spain cities such as C?diz) it is replaced with ustedes. It is remarkable that the informal use of ustedes in southern Spain does not keep the proper pronoun-verb agreement: while the formal form of "you go" would be ustedes van, in C?diz the informal form would be constructed as ustedes vais, making use of the second person of the plural instead of the third (which constitutes the formal construction).

Vos is used extensively as the primary spoken form of the second-person singular pronoun in various countries around Latin America, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Uruguay and the Zulian state of Venezuela. In Argentina, Uruguay, and increasingly in Paraguay, it is also the standard form used in the media, whereas media in other voseante countries continue to use usted or t?. Vos may also be present in other countries as a limited regionalism. Its use, depending on country and region, can be considered the accepted standard or reproached as sub-standard and considered as speech of the ignorant and uneducated. The interpersonal situations in which the employment of vos is acceptable may also differ considerably between regions.

Spanish forms also differ regarding second-person plural pronouns. The Spanish dialects of Latin America have only one form of the second-person plural; ustedes (formal/familiar). Meanwhile, in Spain there are two; ustedes (formal) and vosotros (familiar/informal).

The RAE (Real Academia Espa?ola), in association with twenty-one other national language academies, exercises a controlling influence through its publication of dictionaries and widely respected grammar guides and style guides. In part due to this influence, and also because of other socio-historical reasons, a neutral standardized form of the language (Standard Spanish) is widely acknowledged for use in literature, academic contexts and the media.

Some words are different, sometimes embarrasingly so, in different coutries. Most Spanish speakers will recognise the Spanish forms, even where they are not normally used, but Spaniards will not recognise American usages. For example, Spanish mantequilla, aguacate, albaricoque become manteca, palta, damasco in Argentina (butter, avocado, apricot). The everyday Spanish words coger (catch, get, pick up) and concha (seashell) are seriously rude in parts of the Southern Cone of South America.

The pronunciation of any Spanish word can be perfectly predicted from its written form.

Spanish is written using the Latin alphabet, with the addition of ? (e?e). Historically ch (che, pronounced [tʃ]) and ll (doble ele) were until 1994 defined as single letters, with their own names and places in the alphabet (a, b, c, ch, d, ..., l, ll, m, n, ?, ...). Since 1994 these letters have been abolished, and replaced with the appropriate letter pair. This effectively means that spelling is visibly unchanged, but words with "ch" are now sorted between "ce" and "ci", instead of following "cz", and similarly for "ll".

The letter u sometimes carries diaeresis (?) after the letter g, and stressed vowels carry acute accents (?) in many words. These marks usually indicate deviations from what would be expected if one followed the customary rules of Spanish orthography. For example, gue indicates that the g is hard before the e sound. However, g?e means that the u is also pronounced (in this case, with the w sound.) Accent marks usually indicate that the customary rules of accentuation (stress the last syllable of any word ending in a consonant (including y) other than n or s; stress the next to last syllable otherwise) are to be ignored. In a few cases, an accented letter is used to distinguish meaning: compare el (= the before a masculine singular noun) with ?l (= he or it). Words that could otherwise be mistaken for function words are often given accents (such as "t?", tea, or "d?" and "s?", forms of "dar" and either "saber" or "ser", respectively). Interrogative pronouns (que, cual, donde, quien, etc.) receive accents when in questions or indirect questions. Demonstrative pronouns (ese, este, aquel, etc.) have accents when they refer to a specific, implied object and are not being used as adjectives. In addition, o (= or) is written with an accent between numerals to indicate that it is not part of the numerals: e.g., 10 ? 20 should be read as diez o veinte rather than diez mil veinte. Accent marks are frequently omitted on capital letters, but should not be.

Interrogative and exclamatory clauses begin with inverted question ( ? ) and exclamation marks ( ? ).

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