A nonlinear speed control for a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) using a simple disturbance estimation technique is presented. By using a feedback linearization scheme, the nonlinear motor model can be linearized in a controllable canonical form, and the desired speed dynamics can be obtained based on the linearized model. This technique, however, gives an undesirable output performance under the mismatch of the system parameters and load conditions. To cancel disturbance by parameter variation, the controller parameters will be estimated by using a disturbance observer theory where the disturbance torque and flux linkage are estimated. since only the two reduced order observers are used for the parameter estimations, the observer designs are considerably simple and the additional load for computation of the controller is negligibly small. The proposed control scheme is implemented on a PMSM using DSP TMS320C31 and the effectiveness is verified through the comparative simulations and experiments.