Spanish · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "qué" in Spanish?

Q: How do you pronounce qué in Spanish?

qué is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ke/. It means “what.” keh, one syllable — the u is silent and the accent flags it as a question word.

keh, one syllable — the u is silent and the accent flags it as a question word.

qué /ke/

One syllable, so the accent cannot be assigning stress within the word. It marks "qué" as interrogative or exclamatory, distinguishing it from the unaccented "que" that links clauses. In a sentence, though, the accented one really does carry emphasis, so the mark is a fair signal of how it sounds in the flow.

Listen: qué

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Sound it out

qu A hard k, no puff of air, and the u makes no sound at all. Spanish writes qu before e and i purely to keep the k hard, since a bare c there would come out as an s.

é A short "eh" as in "bed". The accent is not lengthening or changing this vowel — Spanish accents never alter vowel quality, only stress or word identity.

Hear it in a sentence

¿Qué es esto?

What is this?

Listen: ¿Qué es esto?

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"¿Qué es esto?" runs three vowel-adjacent words together — keh-e-SES-to in natural speech — with the s of "es" linking into "esto". The inverted question mark at the start tells your voice to prepare a rising contour before the first word, something English handles with word order instead.

Where English speakers slip

English voices the u in "quest" and "queen", so readers voice it here too and produce "kweh". In Spanish the u after q is silent every time. The other half of the problem is accentuation in writing: "que" and "qué" sound the same, so learners write whichever comes to hand, and "dice que" versus "dice qué" is the difference between he says that and he says what.