Saying that the Spanish letter Ñ is like an N with a squiggly on top is like saying the R is a P with a kickstand. Try reading a text in English where all the Rs have been changed to Ps and you’ll know what it feels like when you speak Spanish and have to read from peeps who insist on just writing Ns instead of Ñs.

The Ñ is a letter in itself, that represents an independent phoneme (sound), it’s not a modified N.

Here’s another great example: “Feliz Año Nuevo” literally means, “Happy New Year” (where “Feliz” = happy, “Año” = Year and “Nuevo”=New). If you change that to “Feliz Ano Nuevo” you land in “Happy New Anus” and I really think it’s highly improbable that you ever find yourself in a situation where congratulating a person on acquiring a new asshole would be deemed appropriate.

The EU may think it’s not that big a deal but it is (*). The attempts of certain entities to eliminate such a distinctive character from the Spanish alphabet are,hence, quite infuriating to many of us. It’s no different to me than trying to eliminate the entire Chinese alphabet for the sake of “trading convenience” or “global normalization”. Would anybody ever propose that and have any realistic expectation of success? Of course not.

So back in the day I came up with a fun design to protest against it and proceeded to put it up for sale in an online shop (making NO profit whatsoever for myself, just for fun) so that others could carry the message around in case anybody ever wanted to.

That’s it. Again, I make absolutely ZERO profit out of it.

NOTE: for those of you in the American continent, who take offense with swear words (as opposed to most Europeans who range from those who disregard giving words too much power to those who openly consider cussing a healthy practice of linguistic emphatic finesse),  caution should be exercised as this shirt contains a very common Spanish swearword not considered obscene in Spain in its present context, but pretty strong-sounding in some other Spanish-speaking countries.

That said, you should really consider getting your own Ñ t-shirt. It’s good for your cholesterol.

Buy an ñ t-shirt (zero markup)

(*) The European Union has attempted a few times to eliminate this emblematic letter of the Spanish alphabet in the name of “normalization”.