Papiamento Orthography - Spelling-to-sound Correspondences - Consonants and Consonant Combinations - Double Consonants and Digraphs

Double Consonants and Digraphs

Consonants are seldom doubled in Papiamento/u. According to the orthographies of both dialects, this only occurs when a word takes on a prefix, e.g. ⟨in-⟩ as in innatural (unnatural), or a suffix, e.g. ⟨-nan⟩ as in pannan (breads). In Papiamentu, numerals are written as one word, e.g. dosshen (two hundred) and are another example of where consonants may appear twice, but in Papiamento they are not, e.g. dos cien/shen. In Papiamento where the letter ⟨c⟩ is often used, the first ⟨c⟩ in words like acceso and occidente is pronounced .

The four official digraphs are ⟨ch⟩, ⟨dj⟩, ⟨sh⟩ and ⟨zj⟩, representing, and respectively. The combination ⟨sc⟩ appears in Papiamento in loan words such as adolescente, but it is not considered a digraph.