1 The Academy also has ruled that while CH and LL are
considered letters, for alphabetization purposes only
they should not be treated that way. It used to be
that dictionaries would list all the words beginning
with CH separately, after the words beginning with C,
so, for example, the word achatar would be listed after
acordar. But in most modern dictionaries, the words are
alphabetized as they would be in English (except that
the Ñ comes after the N).
The Association of Spanish Language Academies met in
Madrid for its 10th Annual Congress on April 27, 1994
and voted to eliminate CH and LL as seperate letters of
the Spanish alpabet.2
This was probably done to make life easy for computer
programmers so they can allow the characters to
be sorted in a simple ASCII order.
If this was not true computer programmers when sorting
would have to compress
ch and ll into special characters before sorting
and after
the sorting uncompressing ch and ll.
2That was from the book "501 Spanish Verbs Fourth Edition" by
Christophr Kendris, Ph.D., page xl