Acute accent

Uses

History

Pitch

Ancient Greek

Stress

• Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word: soyópokistsi "leaves".
• Bulgarian: stress, which is variable in Bulgarian, is not usually indicated in Bulgarian except in dictionaries and sometimes in homonyms that are distinguished only by stress. However, Bulgarian usually uses the grave accent to mark the vowel in a stressed syllable, unlike Russian, which uses the acute accent.
• Catalan uses it in stressed vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
• Dutch uses it to mark stress or a more closed vowel if it is not clear from context. Sometimes, it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a".
• Galician
• Hopi has acute to mark a higher tone.
• Italian The accent is used to indicate the stress in a word, or whether the vowel is "open" or "wide", or "closed", or "narrow". For example, pèsca "peach" and pésca "fishing".
• Lakota. For example, kákhi "in that direction" but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
• Leonese uses it for marking stress or disambiguation.
• Modern Greek marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic word: , , , , , , .
• Navajo where the acute marks a higher tone.
• Norwegian, Swedish and Danish use the acute accent to indicate that a terminal syllable with the e is stressed and is often omitted if it does not change the meaning: armen means "the arm" while armén means "the army"; ide means "bear's den" while idé means "idea". Also stress-related are the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét. In Norwegian, however, the neuter word "one" is spelled ett. Then, the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object, which derives from the obsolete spelling een and eet. Some loanwords, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, such as Norwegian and Swedish kafé and Danish café.
• Occitan
• Portuguese: á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height.
• Russian. Stress is irregular in Russian, and in reference and teaching materials, stress is indicated by an acute accent above the stressed vowel. The acute accent can be used both in the Cyrillic and sometimes in the romanised text.
• Spanish marks stressed syllables in words that deviate from the standardized stress patterns. It is also used to distinguish homophones such as el and él.
• Ukrainian: marks the stress, but in regular typography is only used when it can help to distinguish between homographs: за́мок vs. замо́к. Commonly used in dictionaries and some children books.
• Welsh: word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final vowel is by the use of the acute accent. In the Welsh orthography, it can be on any vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú, ẃ, or ý. Examples: casáu "to hate", sigarét "cigarette", ymbarél "umbrella".

  Height

• To mark high vowels:
• *Bislama. The acute is used only on é, but only in one 34 the two orthographies. It distinguishes é from e. The orthography after 1995, does not distinguish these sounds.
• *Catalan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é , and ó .
• *French. The acute is used on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes é from è, ê, and e. Unlike other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
• *Italian. The acute accent is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel. Words ending in stressed -o are never marked with an acute accent, but with a grave accent. Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché ; in the conjugated copula è ; in ambiguous monosyllables such as né vs. ne and sé vs. se ; and some verb forms, e.g. poté. The symbol ó can be used in the body of a word for disambiguation, for instance between bótte and bòtte, though this is not mandatory: in fact standard Italian keyboards lack a dedicated ó key.
• *Occitan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é , ó and á .
• *Scottish Gaelic uses/used a system in which é is contrasted with è and ó with ò. Both the grave and acute indicate length; é/è and ó/ò are thus contrasted with e and o respectively. Besides, á appears in the words á, ám and ás in order to distinguish them from a, am and as respectively. The other vowels only appear either without an accent or with a grave. Since the 1980s the SQA and most publishers have abandoned the acute accent, using grave accents in all situations. However, universities, some publishers and many speakers continue to use acute accents.
• To mark low vowels:
• *Portuguese. The vowels á, é and ó are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê and ô which are stressed high vowels. However, the accent is only used in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word: where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, no accent is used, and the height of the stressed vowel cannot then usually be determined solely from the word's spelling.

  Length

Long vowels

• 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 except in Bahá'í orthography.
• Classical Latin
• Czech: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý are the long versions of a, e, i, o, u, y. The accent is known as čárka. To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek is used instead, to form ů.
• Hungarian: í, ó, ú are the long equivalents of the vowels i, o, u. The ő, ű are the long equivalents of ö, ü. Both type of accents are known as hosszú ékezet. The letters á and é are two long vowels but they are two vowels on their own rather than the long equivalents of a and e.
• 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 , usually abbreviated to fada. The fada can affect pronunciation or meaning; for instance, Seán is "John" in Irish but sean means "old".
• Old Norse: á, é, í, ó, ú, ý are the long versions of a, e, i, o, u, y. Sometimes, is used as the long version of, but is used more often. Sometimes, the short-lived Old Icelandic long is written using an acute-accented form,, or a version with a macron,, but usually it is not distinguished from from which it is derived by u-mutation.
• Slovak: the acute accent is called dĺžeň in Slovak. In addition to the long vowels á, é, í, ó, ú and ý, dĺžeň is used to mark two syllabic consonants ŕ and ĺ, which are the long counterparts of syllabic r and l.

  Short vowels

• Ligurian: in the official orthography, é is used for short, and ó is used for short.

  Palatalization

Tone

Disambiguation

• Catalan. Examples: són "they are" vs. son "tiredness", més "more" vs. mes "month".
• Danish. Examples: én "one" vs. en "a/an"; fór "went" vs. for "for"; véd "know" vs. ved "by"; gǿr "bark" vs. gør "do"; dǿr "die" 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 : 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.
• Dutch. Examples: één "one" vs. een "a/an"; vóór "before" vs. voor "for"; vóórkomen "to exist/to happen" vs. voorkómen "to prevent/to avoid". Using an acute accent is mostly optional.
• 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, the feminine definite article, versus, meaning "or". Other cases include που versus πού and πως versus πώς.
• Norwegian. It is used to indicate stress on a vowel otherwise not expected to have stress. Most words are stressed on the first syllable and diacritical marks are rarely used. Although incorrect, it is frequently used to mark the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere as it is in Danish: kontrollér is the imperative form of "to control", kontroller is the noun "controls". The simple past of the verb å fare, "to travel", can optionally be written fór, to distinguish it from for, fôr "feed" n./"lining", or fòr "narrow ditch, trail by plow"
• Portuguese. Examples: avô "grandfather" vs. avó "grandmother", nós "subject pronoun we" vs. nos "oblique case".
• Russian. Acute accents are used in dictionaries to indicate the stressed syllable. They may also be optionally used to disambiguate both between minimal pairs, such as за́мок and замо́к, and between question words and relative pronouns such as что, similarly to Spanish. This is rare, however, as usually meaning is determined by context and no stress mark is written. The same rules apply to Ukrainian, Rusyn, Belarusian and Bulgarian.
• Spanish. Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs where the first is stressed and the second is a clitic, such as cómo and como, differentiates qué from que, dónde and donde "where", and some other words such as tú "you" and tu "your," té "tea" and te "you", él "he/him" and el, sólo "only" and solo "alone". This usage of the acute accent is called tilde diacrítica.

  Emphasis

• In Danish, the acute accent can also be used for emphasis, especially on the word der, as in 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".
• 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 the Armenian script emphasis on a word is marked by an acute accent above the word's stressed vowel; it is traditionally grouped with the Armenian question and exclamation marks which are also diacritics applied to the stressed vowel.

  Letter extension

• In Faroese, the acute accent is used on five of the vowels, but these letters, á, í, ó, ú and ý are considered separate letters with separate pronunciations.
• : á: long, short and before :
• : í/ý: long, short
• : ó: long, or, short:, except Suðuroy:
• :: When ó is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced, except in Suðuroy where it is
• : ú: long, short
• :: When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronounced
• In Hungarian, the acute accent marks a difference in quality on two vowels, apart from vowel length:
• :The vowel a is open back rounded, but á is open front unrounded .
• :Similarly, the vowel e is open-mid front unrounded, while é is close-mid front unrounded.
• :Despite this difference, in most of the cases, these two pairs are arranged as equal in collation, just like the other pairs that only differ in length.
• In Icelandic the acute accent is used on all 6 of the vowels, and, like in Faroese, these are considered separate letters.
• : á:
• : é: long, short
• : í/ý:
• : ó:
• : ú:
• :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 Kashubian, Polish, and Sorbian, the acute on "ó", historically used to indicate a lengthening of "o", now indicates higher pronunciation, and, respectively.
• In Turkmen, the letter ý is a consonant:.

  Other uses

• In some Basque texts predating Standard Basque, the letters and carry acute accents, which are otherwise indicated by double letters. In such cases, is used to represent and for .
• 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, while sú transliterates the second sign with the value.
• In Emilian-Romagnol, é ó denote both length and height. In Romagnol they represent , while in Emilian they represent .
• In Indonesian dictionaries, is used to represent, while is used to represent.
• In Northern Sámi, an acute accent was placed over the corresponding Latin letter to represent the letters peculiar to this language when typing when there was no way of entering these letters correctly otherwise.
• 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, 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 and resumé. There are two pairs of homographs that are differentiated only by the accent: armé versus arme and idé versus ide.
• and are used in Pashto in the Latin alphabet, equivalent to and, respectively.

  English

• It can mark stress on an unusual syllable: for example, caléndar to indicate .
• It can disambiguate stress where the distinction is metrically important: for example, rébel, or áll trádes, to show that the phrase is pronounced as a spondee, rather than the more natural iamb.
• It can indicate the sounding of an ordinarily silent letter: for example, pickéd to indicate the pronunciation, rather than standard .

Typographic form

Technical notes

Microsoft Windows

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

Microsoft Office

Macintosh OS X

Keyboards

Internet

Limitations