What is the deal with capitalization?
What are the rules for capitalization in the Spanish language? Are there proper nouns? How do you know what to capitalize/ not to capitalize.
2 Answers
The rules are actually much easier once you get to know them. I might not have all of them here (so everyone, please feel free to add more), but these are the down and dirty:
Names- the first letter of all proper or nicknames names for people and animals are capitalized.
Organizations- The first letter of all the words (excluding "de," "para," etc.) are capitalized. Ex. Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). This brings us to acronyms.
Just as in English, all letters for acronyms are capitalized.
Titles to works of art or publications- ONLY the first letter of these items are capitalized. Ex. "Continuidad de los parques"
Sometimes these rules will mix to make exceptions (just like in English): Ex. "La señorita Julia" Here we have a title of a work of art, so the first letter is capitalized, but we also have a proper name (or proper noun), Julia, so that is capitalized as well.
I hope this helped!
Aquí Here are a few, in English we capitalize days of a week or months, in Spanish we do not. In English we capitalize every word of a title except for words like of or the in the middle of a title. In Spanish we only capitalize the first word of a title. In English we capitalize the title before a name where as in Spanish we do not. In English we capitalize words such as English and Spanish. Where as in Spanish we say, inglés o español. I hope I covered the basics. Thank you.
