Acute accent

Á	á
Ć	ć
É	é

Í	í

Ĺ	ĺ

Ń	ń
Ó	ó

Ŕ	ŕ
Ś	ś
Ú	ú

Ý	ý
Ź	ź

The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. The word acute is derived from the Latin acutus ("sharp"), itself a loan translation of the Greek (oxýs).

Height

The acute accent marks the height or openness of the vowels e and o in various Romance languages. In French, Italian and Catalan, it indicates that these vowels are high. In Portuguese, by contrast, á, é and ó are low vowels.

In Catalan, the acute accent is used to mark both the stress and the distinct quality of certain stressed vowels, such as è versus é or such as ò versus ó [o. The letters i and u may take the acute accent, too, but it just indicates stress (see below).

In Italian as well, the acute accent can be used on e and o. However, it is only compulsory on words stressed on their final vowel, and there are no words ending in ó. Therefore, only é is used in normal text, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché ("why/because"). It makes an e be pronounced as , in a position it would normally be pronounced as ; it also marks the stressed vowel (mostly the last one), where the stress would normally be on another syllable (just as in Spanish). Ó can be used for disambiguation, for instance between bótte, "barrel", and bòtte, "beating", but is not mandatory, and is not even present on Italian keyboard layouts. Since the actual pronunciations of the pairs è/é and ò/ó in the same words varies across the country, they are mostly a convention rather than a pronunciation note, and some proposed to remove the acute accent from Italian orthography.

In French the acute accent is used only on the letter e, where it changes the vowel sound. The mark is known as "accent aigu" and distinguishes é from è , and e . This distinction did not exist in Old French.

Stress

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

In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Galician, it marks the stressed vowel of a word that would normally be stressed on another syllable, since stress is contrastive in these languages. For example, in Spanish ánimo ("mood, spirit"), animo ("I cheer"), and animó ("he cheered") are three different words, stressed on their first, second, and last syllables, respectively.

In Welsh words the stress is always given on the penultimate syllable unless indicated otherwise by the use of an acute accent on the stressed vowel; this can be on an a, e, i, o, u, w, or y. For example casáu ("to hate"), caniatáu ("to allow, to permit").

In Swedish, the accute accent are used to indicate that a terminal syllable with the vowel e is stressed, and is often only written out when it changes the meaning. For example ide ("bear's nest") vs. idé ("idea"); armen ("the arm") vs. armén ("the army") — in both cases the first syllable is stressed without the accent. An accute accent written over any other vowel would probably be similarly interpreted as indicating the stressed syllable by Swedish-speakers, but there are no such words in Swedish.

In Greek it is nowadays always used on the stressed syllable of a word. In Ancient Greek it more specifically indicated a syllable with a high tone, the grave accent and circumflex being used in other cases, but this distinction has disappeared in the modern language.

Length

In Hungarian, Irish, Czech, and Slovak the acute accent is used to mark the quantity or length of the base vowel. This is the same contrast that differentiated long and short vowels in classical Latin, or that nowadays differentiate simple and double vowels in written Finnish. In Czech and Slovak a vowel marked with an accent is called a "long vowel"; it does not have the same meaning as a "long vowel" in English. In Czech, the letter u can have an acute accent only at the beginning of a word or a word stem (after a prefix). To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring) is used instead, to form ů. In Slovak, there are 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.

The use of the acute (see also háček) to denote long pronunciation of Latin characters was introduced by Jan Hus in the 15th century into the Czech language and today it is also used by the Slovaks, Slovenians, Croats, Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians and partly by the Poles, although in many of these languages it has other function than marking the long vowels. It is also often used for international transliteration.

In Irish Gaelic, the acute accent, known as a síneadh fada (/ˌʃiːnʲə ˈfadˠə/), denotes a long vowel as opposed to a short one.

Tone

In some tonal languages transcribed with the Latin alphabet, such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising tone.

In African languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e.g. Yoruba apá 'arm', Nobiin féntí 'sweet date', Ekoti kaláwa 'boat'.

Palatalization

In Polish, the acute accent is used over several letters - four consonants and one vowel. Over the consonants, it is used to indicate palatalization, similar to the use of háček in Czech and other Slavic languages; eg. sześć // (six) However, the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute, and placed slightly right of center. Over the vowel "ó" it indicates pronunciation change into and historically it indicated that the vowel was long.

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

Disambiguation

In Spanish and Dutch, the acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. In Spanish, this covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs, such as cómo (interrogative how) & como (non-interrogative how), dónde & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the, masculine); in Dutch, this is mainly één (one) & een (a/an).

In Danish, the usage of the acute accent is very similar to the Dutch usage, for example én (one) vs. en (a/an) and fór (went) and for (for).

In Norwegian, the acute accent is similar to Danish. In Norwegian bokmål, it is also used for the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere, which lose their final e and might look like plurals (most often ending in -er) of some noun: kontrollér is the imperative form of "to control", kontroller is the noun "controls". The simple past of the (disused) verb å fare, "to travel", is fór, to distinguish it from for ("for" as in English).

Emphasis

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, "Het is ónze auto, niet die van jullie." ("This is our car, not yours.") In this example, ónze is merely an emphasized form of onze.

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".

Other uses

In Faroese, the acute accent is used on 5 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. Etymologically, they correspond to their Old Norse counterparts, the only exception is é, which in Faroese é has become Æ.

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 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.

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.

In Turkmen, the letter Ý is a consonant: ^*

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/.

Many Norwegian words of French origin retain an acute accent, such as allé, kafé, idé, komité, diskré. Popular usage can be sketchy and often neglects the accent, and there exists a certain degree of interchangeability with the grave accent. 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 resumé ("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 Dutch, ó is often used to as an alternate to the British "oh." It is used mostly as an expression of disappointment, though it can be used to suggest one has nothing to say on the matter. Popularised by Bas Redeker and Jaroslaw Zaba, it is now used across England, particularly in Internet culture.

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 sauté, roué, café, touché, fiancé, and fiancée but many consider this nonstandard. 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.

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, adiós, coup d'état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée.

Accents are sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation: for example, spelling the word picked (often ) as pickéd to indicate the pronunciation or . The grave accent is also sometimes used for this purpose.

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 and extended ASCII character encodings 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 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. Spanish speakers had to learn these codes if they wanted to be able to write acute accents before the appearance of Spanish keyboards, but some preferred using the Microsoft Word spell checker to add the accent for them. The codes are:

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

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 babelfish automatic translator 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-(vowel); for example, á is formed by pressing Option-e-a.

External links

Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
Polish Diacritics: Kreska: Not exactly acute
Keyboard Help - Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer

Diacritics

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