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The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritical mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.

History

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.

The acute accent first appeared with this name in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. Modern Greek has a stress accent instead of a pitch accent, so the diacritic is now used to mark the stressed vowel of a word.

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages:

• Catalan. Used in stressed high vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
• Dutch. Used to disambiguate between words that differ only in stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur resp. prevent) or openness (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh, respectively; or één – een, meaning one resp. a) where this is not otherwise reflected in the spelling.
• Galician
• Lakota. For example, kákhi "in that direction", but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
• Leonese. Used for marking stress or disambiguation.
• Modern Greek, where it marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic word: ά (á), έ (é), ή (í), ί (í), ό (ó), ύ (ý), ώ (ó).
• Occitan. Used in stressed vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
• Portuguese: á, é, í, ó, ú. May also indicate height (see below).
• Russian. When it is required (like in dictionaries, books for children or foreigners), stress is indicated by an acute accent " ́" to distinguish between minimal pairs, such as зáмок ("castle") and замóк ("padlock"). Usually, though, meaning is determined by context, and no accent mark is written. The same rules apply in Ukrainian, Belarusian and Bulgarian languages. The acute accent can be used both in the Cyrillic and sometimes in the romanised text. However, this is not the case for Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian, as these languages have a semi-fixed stress on the second-last and/or third-last syllable, making the use of accents redundant.
• Spanish. Used on vowels to mark stress. Occasionally it is also used to distinguish between homophones. See below.
• Swedish and Danish. The acute accent is used to indicate that a terminal syllable with the vowel e is stressed, and is often written out only when it changes the meaning. For example: armen (first syllable stressed) means "the arm", while armén means "the army"; ide (both syllables stressed) means "bear's nest", while idé means "idea". Also stress related is the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét (the indefinite article and the word "one" in Danish). In this case the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object. Derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loan-words, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, like filé and kafé.
• Welsh. Word stress always falls on the penultimate syllable, unless indicated otherwise by the use of an acute accent on the stressed vowel; this can be on an á, é, í, ó, ú, ẃ, or ý. For example casáu "to hate", caniatáu "to allow, to permit".

Height

The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages.

• To mark high vowels:
  • Spanish. The acute accent denotes the syllable where the stress happens. It can be found only in vowels and, as many other languages, is used for diacritic purposes in some cases. By rule it is placed over vowels in certain words for marking a hiatus.
  • Catalan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é [e] (as opposed to è [ɛ]), and ó [o] (as opposed to ò [ɔ]).
  • French. Used only on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave which is the accent the other way and distinguishes é [e] from è, ê [ɛ], and e [ə]. Unlike other Romance languages, the accent marks rarely imply stress in French as the stress is almost always on the last syllable of each word.
  • Italian. The acute accent is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel (and a few other words), and there are hardly any words ending in ó. Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché "why/because"; in the conjugated copula è ("is"); in ambiguous monosyllables such as né 'neither' vs. ne 'of it' and sé 'itself' vs. se 'if'; and some verb forms, e.g. poté "he/she/it could" (past tense). The symbol ó can be used for disambiguation, for instance between bótte, "barrel", and bòtte, "beating", though this is not mandatory.
  • Occitan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é [e] (as opposed to è [ɛ]), ó [u] (as opposed to ò [ɔ]) and á [ɔ/e] (as opposed to à [a]).
• To mark low vowels:
  • Portuguese. The vowels á, é, ó, are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê, ô which are stressed high vowels.

Length

The acute accent marks long vowels in several languages:

• Czech. To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring) is used instead, to form ů.
• Hungarian: á, é, í, ó, ú are the long equivalents of the vowels a, e, i, o, u (the former two also implying a change in quality, see below), while ő, ű (see double acute accent) are the long equivalents of ö, ü.
• Irish: á, é, í, ó, ú are the long equivalents of the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The accent is known as a síneadh fada /ˌʃiːnʲə ˈfadˠə/ (length accent), usually abbreviated to fada.
• Slovak. This language has also two more "long vowels" (which are consonants in the alphabet, but vowels in terms of their function): ŕ and ĺ, which are pronounced just like ordinary syllabic r and l, only longer.
• Arabic and Persian: á, í, ú were used in western transliteration of Islamic language texts from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Representing the long vowels, they are typically transcribed with a macron today.

Palatalization

A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized sound in several languages.

In Polish, such a mark is known as a kreska (English: stroke) and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization, similar to the use of the háček in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. sześć [ˈʂɛɕt​͡ɕ] "six"). However, in contrast to the háček which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the kreska denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the kreska is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center.^[1] A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Lacinka. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian the letter ć is used to represent a palatalized t.

In the romanization of Macedonian, ǵ and ḱ represent the Cyrillic letters Ѓ and Ќ, which stand for palatal or alveolo-palatal consonants, though gj and kj (or đ and ć) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated Proto-Indo-European phonemes /gʲ/ and /kʲ/.

Tone

In some tonal languages written with the Latin alphabet, such as Vietnamese written in the standard Quốc Ngữ system, and Mandarin Chinese written in the Pinyin romanization, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising (or second) tone, the alternative for the acute accent in Mandarin is number 2 after the syllable, e.g. lái = lai2.

In African languages and Athabaskan languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e.g., Yoruba apá 'arm', Nobiin féntí 'sweet date', Ekoti kaláwa 'boat', Navajo t’áá 'just'.

Disambiguation

The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages:

• Danish. Examples: én "one" vs. en "a/an"; fór "went" vs. for "for"; véd "know(s)" vs. ved "by"; gǿr "bark(s)" vs. gør "do(es)"; dǿr "die(s)" vs. dør "door"; allé "alley" vs. alle "everybody".
  Furthermore, it is also used for the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere, which lose their final e and might be mistaken for plurals of a noun (which most often end in -er): analysér is the imperative form of at analysere "to analyse", analyser is "analyses", plural of the noun analyse "analysis". Using an acute accent is always optional, never required.
• Modern Greek. Although all polysyllabic words have an acute accent on the stressed syllable, in monosyllabic words the presence or absence of an accent may disambiguate. The most common case is η, the feminine definite article ("the"), versus ή, meaning "or".
• Norwegian. It is not used for the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere as it is in Danish: kontroller is the imperative form of "to control", kontroller is the noun "controls". In Nynorsk, the simple past of the verb å fare, "to travel", can optionally be written fór, to distinguish it from for (preposition "for" as in English), fôr "feed" n./"lining", or fòr "narrow ditch, trail by plow (all the diacritics in these examples are optional^[2]).
• Spanish. Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs where the first is stressed and the second is a clitic, such as cómo (interrogative "how") and como (non-interrogative "how", comparative "like", "I eat"), differentiates qué (what) from que (that), dónde and donde "where", and some other words such as tú "you" and tu "your," té "tea" and te "you" (direct/indirect object), él "he/him" and el ("the", masculine). This usage of the acute accent is called acento diacrítico.

Emphasis

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, "Dit is ónze auto, niet die van jullie," "This is our car, not yours." In this example, ónze is merely an emphasized form of onze. Also in family names like Piét, Piél, Plusjé, Hofsté.

In Danish, the acute accent can also be used for emphasis, especially on the word der (there), ex. "Der kan ikke være mange mennesker dér," meaning "There can't be many people there" or "Dér skal vi hen" meaning "That's where we're going".

Letter extension

• In Faroese, the acute accent is used on five of the vowels (a, i, o, u and y), but these letters, á, í, ó, ú and ý are considered separate letters with separate pronunciations.

á: long [ɔa], short [ɔ] and before [a]: [õ]

í/ý: long [ʊiː], short [ʊi]

ó: long [ɔu], [ɛu] or [œu], short: [œ], except Suðuroy: [ɔ]

When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced [ɛ], except in Suðuroy where it is [ɔ]

ú: long [ʉu], short [ʏ]

When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced [ɪ]

• In Hungarian, the acute accent marks a difference in quality on two vowels, apart from vowel length:

The (short) vowel a is open back rounded (ɒ), but á is open front unrounded (a) (and long).

Similarly, the (short) vowel e is open-mid front unrounded (ɛ), while (long) é is close-mid front unrounded (e).

Despite this difference, these two pairs are arranged as equal in collation, just like the other pairs (see above) that only differ in length.

• In Icelandic the acute accent is used on 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, as in Faroese, these are considered separate letters.

A sample extract of Icelandic.

á: [au(ː)]

é: long [jeɛː], short [jɛ]

í/ý: [i(ː)]

ó: [ou(ː)]

ú: [u(ː)]

All can be either short or long, but note that the pronunciation of é is not the same short and long.

Etymologically, vowels with an acute accent in these languages correspond to their Old Norse counterparts, which were long vowels but in many cases have become diphthongs. The only exception is é, which in Faroese has become æ.

• In Polish, the acute on "ó" indicates a pronunciation change into [u], and historically it was used to indicate a long vowel.
• In Turkmen, the letter Ý is a consonant: [j].

Other uses

• Many Norwegian words of French origin retain an acute accent, such as allé, kafé, idé, komité. Popular usage can be sketchy and often neglects the accent, or results in the grave accent, erroneously being used in its place. Likewise, in Swedish, the acute accent is used only for the letter e, mostly in words of French origin and in some names. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel quantity as well as quality and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include café ("café") and résumé ("resumé", noun). There are two pairs of homographs that are differentiated only by the accent: armé ("army") versus arme ("poor; pitiful", masculine gender) and idé ("idea") versus ide ("winter quarters").
• In Northern Sámi, an acute accent was placed over the corresponding Latin letter to represent the letters peculiar to this language (Áá, Čč, Đđ, Ŋŋ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž) when typing when there was no way of entering these letters correctly otherwise.^[3]
• In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform, an acute accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the second representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus su is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value /su/, while sú transliterates the second sign with the value /su/.
• In some Basque texts, the letters r and l carry acute accents, which are otherwise indicated by double letters. In such cases, ŕ is used to represent rr (a trilled r, this spelling is used only internally in words, to differentiate between -r-, an alveolar tap–in Basque /r/ in word-initial and word-final positions is always trilled) and ĺ for ll (a palatalized /l/).

Use in English

As with other diacritical marks, a number of loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent used in the original language: these include café, fiancé, fiancée, passé, roué, sauté, and touché. Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as resumé, with only one accent (but also with both or none).

Acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final e is not silent, for example, maté from Spanish mate, saké, and the Maldivian capital Malé, the last two from languages which do not use the Roman alphabet, and where transcriptions do not normally use acute accents.

For foreign terms used in English that have not been assimilated into English or are not in general English usage, italics are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, coup d'état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée and ancien régime.

Accents are sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation: for example, spelling the word picked (normally [pɪkt]) as pickéd to indicate the pronunciation ['pɪkɪd]. The grave accent is more usually used for this purpose.

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 character encoding include the letters á, é, í, ó, ú, ý, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the acute accent are available in Unicode. Unicode also provides the acute accent as a separate character U+00B4 and a combining character, U+0301.

On Windows computers, letters with acute accents can be created by holding down the alt key and typing in a three-number code on the number pad to the right of the keyboard before releasing the alt key. Before the appearance of Spanish keyboards, Spanish speakers had to learn these codes if they wanted to be able to write acute accents, though some preferred using the Microsoft Word spell checker to add the accent for them. Some young computer users got in the habit of not writing accented letters at all. The codes (which come from the IBM PC encoding) are:

• 160 for á
• 130 for é
• 161 for í
• 162 for ó
• 163 for ú

The concept of dead key, a key that modified the meaning of the next key press, was developed to overcome this problem. This acute accent key was already present on typewriters where it typed the accent without moving the carriage, so a normal letter could be written on the same place.

On a UK Keyboard layout, these letters can also be made by holding Ctrl+Alt (or Alt Gr) and the desired letter. Some sites, such as Wikipedia or the Alta Vista automatic translator^[4] allow inserting such symbols by clicking on a link in a box.

On a Macintosh, an acute accent is placed on a vowel by pressing Option-e and then the vowel, which can also be capitalised; for example, á is formed by pressing Option-e and then 'a', and Á is formed by pressing Option-e and then Shift-a.

See also

• Acute (phonetics)
• Apex (diacritic)
• Circumflex accent
• Double acute accent
• Grave accent

Notes

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
• Keyboard Help — Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer