I am writing a document in Spanish and I notice that the syllable partitioning of words does not conform to the rules of the language. And so, for example, the word "limitarse" is partitioned as "lim-itarse" (the correct one is "li-mi-tar-se"), "colores" as "col-ores" (instead of "co-lo-res"), "abstenerse" as "absten-erse" (and it should be "abs-te-ner-se"), etc.

Make sure that you set up the language correctly. Using this test file (on today's new upload): \language[es] % Needed for Spanish hyphenation \starttext \hsize=0pt % Hack to force hyphenation limitarse colores abstenerse \stoptext I get: li­-mi­-tar­-se // co­-lo­-res // abs­-te­-ner­-se I don't know any Spanish, but using your test words, I think that these are the expected results. Using the "pattern" script, I get slightly different results, but it still seems correct to me: $ mtxrun --script pattern --hyphenate --language=es limitarse [...] mtx-patterns | es 3 3 : limitarse : limi-tarse $ mtxrun --script pattern --hyphenate --language=es colores [...] mtx-patterns | es 3 3 : colores : colo-res $ mtxrun --script pattern --hyphenate --language=es abstenerse [...] mtx-patterns | es 3 3 : abstenerse : abs-te-nerse If adding "\language[es]" to your document doesn't help, I believe that there are a few Spanish speakers on the list who will know much more than I do about setting up the hyphenation. -- Max