The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin script. The word acute is derived from the Latin acutus ("sharp"), itself a borrowing of the Greek ὀξύς (oxys). A diacritical mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ... An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the standard script of the English language and most of the languages of western and central Europe, and of those areas settled by Europeans. ... Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken in by one language from another. ...

Openness

In French and Italian, the acute accent is used only on the letter e, where it changes the vowel sound.

In French, it distinguishes é [e], and e [ə]. In Italian, it makes an é be pronounced as [e], in a position it would normally be pronounced as [ɛ]; it also marks the stressed vowel (mostly the last one), where the stress would normally be on another syllable (just as in Spanish).

Stress or disambiguation

In Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and Galician, the acute accent is used to mark the stressed vowel of a written word that would normally be stressed on another syllable. Stress is contrastive in those languages. For example, in Spanish ánimo ["a-ni-mo] ("mood, spirit"), animo [a-"ni-mo] ("I cheer"), and animó [a-ni-"mo] ("he cheered") are three different words. 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. Catalan (Català, Valencià) is a Romance language understood by as many as 12 million people in portions of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, although the majority of active Catalan speakers are in Spain. ... Galician (Galego) is a language variety of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia (in the Galician language, Galicia, that is recommended, or Galiza), an autonomous community with the constitutional status of historic nationality and located in northwestern Spain, and in areas in the neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias...

In Spanish and Dutch, the acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. In Spanish, various question word / relative pronoun pairs, such as cómo & como (how), dónde & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the); in Dutch, mainly één (one) & een (a/an). Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ...

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, "Ik ben vóór democratie, en was dat al vóór de dood van Pim Fortuyn." In this example, "vóór" is merely an emphasized form of "voor".

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). It 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".

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. The Greek language (Greek Ελληνικά, IPA // – Hellenic) is an Indo-European language with a documented history of some 3,000 years. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese, and other languages. ... The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. ...

In Swedish, the acute accent 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). Only armé ("army") actually has a homograph that is differentiated only by the accent; arme ("poor; pitiful", masculine declination). Homonyms (in Greek homoios = identical and onoma = name) are words which have the same form (orthographic/phonetic) but unrelated meaning. ... In astronomy declination (dec) is one of the two coordinates of the equatorial coordinate system, the other being either right ascension or hour angle. ...

Length

In Hungarian, 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. In punctuation, the term ring is usually reserved for the ring above diacritic mark ˚ (looks similar to °). The ring may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets. ...

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, Icelanders 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. Caron redirects here, for the French actress, see Leslie Caron. ... Renaissance portrait of Jan Hus Jan Hus (1369 Husinec, Southern Bohemia – July 6, 1415 Constance) was a religious thinker and reformer. ... The Czech language is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian, and Sorbian. ... Croats (Croatian: Hrvati) are a south Slavic people mostly living in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (where theyre one of the constitutive nations). ... Sorbian national flag The Sorbs (also Lusatians or Lusatia Serbs) are a relatively small west Slavic people, living as a minority in the region known as Lusatia in the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg (in former GDR territory). ... Transliteration in a narrow sense is a mapping from one script into another script. ...

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, rather as the háček is used in Czech and other Slavic languages; eg. sześć / ʃεɕʨ/ (six) However, the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute. Over the vowel "ó" it indicates pronunciation change into [u]. Palatalization means pronouncing a sound nearer to the hard palate, making it more like a palatal consonant; this is towards the front of the mouth for a velar or uvular consonant, but towards the back of the mouth for a front (e. ... Caron redirects here, for the French actress, see Leslie Caron. ...

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

Other uses

In some tonal languages such as Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising tone. In others, especially African languages, it is used to indicate a high tone. Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ... Mandarin  listen(Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: Běifānghuà, lit. ... The term African languages refers to the approximately 1800 languages spoken in Africa. ...

In Irish Gaelic, the acute accent, known as a síneadh fada (pronounced SHEE-na FA-da), is a sign of lenition and denotes a long vowel as opposed to a short one. Note: This page contains phonetic information presented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) using Unicode. ...

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/. Cuneiform script The Cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ...

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.

• 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 pronunced [ɛ], except in Suðuroy where it is [ɔ]
• ú: long [æa], short [ʏ]
  • When ú is followed by the skerping -gv, it is pronunced [ɪ]

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: [au(ː)]
• é: [jɛ(ː)]
• í/ý: [i(ː)]
• ó: [ou(ː)]
• ú: [u(ː)]

All can be either short or long.

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. 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. It is sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation. (For example, spelling winged (wing'd) as wingéd to indicate that it should be pronounced (wing-ed). A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken in by one language from another. ...

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes 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. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 or less formally as Latin-1, is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard character encoding defined by ISO. It encodes what it refers to as Latin alphabet no. ... Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... Combining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). ...

See also

• circumflex
• diacritic marks
• diaeresis
• grave accent
• hacek
• umlaut

The circumflex ( ˆ ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages. ... A diacritic mark or accent mark is an additional mark added to a basic letter. ... In linguistics, a diaeresis or dieresis (AE) (from Greek diairein, to divide) is the modification of a syllable by distinctly pronouncing one of its vowels. ... The grave accent ( ` ) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek until 1982 (polytonic orthography), French, Catalan, Welsh, Italian, Vietnamese, Scottish Gaelic, Norwegian, Portuguese, and other languages. ... Caron redirects here, for the French actress, see Leslie Caron. ... Ä ä Ö ö Ü ü The term umlaut is used for two closely related notions: a special kind of vowel modification and a particular diacritic mark. ...

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents (http://diacritics.typo.cz)
• Polish Diacritics: Kreska: Not exactly acute (http://www.twardoch.com/download/polishhowto/kreska.html)