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 ὀξύς (oxýs). A diacritical mark or diacritic, also called an accent mark, is a small sign added to a letter to alter pronunciation or to distinguish between similar words. ... For other uses, see Alphabet (disambiguation). ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Writing systems of the world today. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in Latium, the region immediately surrounding Rome. ... Calque In linguistics, a calque ([kælk]) or loan translation (itself a calque of German Lehnübersetzung) consists of the borrowing of a phrase from one language into another, in the process of which individual words native to the borrowing language semantically match the individual words in the source language. ...

Pitch

The acute accent was first used 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. It has been suggested that Diacritics (Greek alphabet) be merged into this article or section. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... Pitch accent is a kind of accent system employed in many languages around the world. ... In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. ...

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages: In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. ...

• Catalan. Used in stressed high vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
• Galician
• Modern Greek, where it marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic word.
• Occitan. Used in stressed high vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
• Portuguese. On the letters a, e, and o, it also indicates height (see below).
• Russian. When it is required (i.e. in dictionaries, books for children or foreigners), stress is indicated by an acute accent.
• Spanish. It may also be used to distinguish between similar words with different meanings. See below.
• Swedish. The acute accent is 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 acute 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.
• 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".

Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia (in the latter with the name of Valencian), and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of... A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. ... Galician (Galician: galego, IPA: ) is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community with the constitutional status of historic nationality, located in northwestern Spain and small bordering zones in neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castilla y León. ... Main article: Greek language Modern Greek (Νέα Ελληνικά or Νεοελληνική, lit. ... A syllable (Ancient Greek: ) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. ... Occitan, known also as Lenga dòc or Langue doc (Occitan: occitan, lenga dòc) is a Romance language spoken in Occitania (i. ... A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. ... Welsh redirects here, and this article describes the Welsh language. ...

Height

The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages. In phonetics, vowel height refers to the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth in a vowel sound. ... The Romance languages, a major branch of the Indo-European language family, comprise all languages that descended from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. ...

• To mark high vowels:
  • 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, and distinguishes é [e] from è [ɛ], ê, and e [ə].
  • 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 [-'o]. Therefore, only é is normally seen in normal text, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché "why/because"; in ambiguous monosyllables such as né 'neither' vs. ne 'of it' and sé 'itself' vs. se 'if'; and some verb forms, e.g. 'vedé'. The symbol ó can be used for disambiguation, for instance between bótte, "barrel", and bòtte, "beating", though this is not mandatory, and rarely used in Italian writing.
  • 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 low.

Catalan IPA: (català IPA: or []) is a Romance language, the national language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia (in the latter with the name of Valencian), and in the city of LAlguer in the Italian island of... The acute accent (   ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin and Greek scripts. ... Occitan, known also as Lenga dòc or Langue doc (Occitan: occitan, lenga dòc) is a Romance language spoken in Occitania (i. ...

Length

The acute accent marks long vowels in several languages: In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. ...

• 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. 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.
• Hungarian
• Irish. The acute accent is known as a síneadh fada /ˌʃiːnʲə ˈfadˠə/ in this language.
• 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.

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. ... č Å¡ ž A háček (ˇ, pronounced ), also known as a caron, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate palatalization or iotation in the orthography of Baltic languages and some Slavic languages, whereas some Finno-Lappic languages use it to mark postalveolar fricatives (sh, zh, ch). ... Jan Hus ( ) (IPA: , alternative spellings John Hus, Jan Huss, John Huss) (c. ... Czech (čeÅ¡tina []) is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian (Kashubian), and Lusatian Sorbian. ... Croats (Croatian: Hrvati) are a South Slavic people mostly living in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and nearby countries. ... 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 is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. ... A syllabic consonant is a consonant which constitutes either a syllable of its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. ...

Palatalization

On consonant letters, the acute accent often represents a palatalized sound. 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. ...

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; e.g. sześć /ʃɛɕʨ/ (six) However, the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute, and placed slightly right of center.^[1] 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. ... č Å¡ ž A háček (ˇ, pronounced ), also known as a caron, is a diacritic placed over certain letters to indicate palatalization or iotation in the orthography of Baltic languages and some Slavic languages, whereas some Finno-Lappic languages use it to mark postalveolar fricatives (sh, zh, ch). ...

In Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian the letter ć is used to represent a palatalized "t" sound. Serbian (српски језик; srpski jezik) is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and by Serbs in the Serbian diaspora. ...

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 tone. Tone refers to the use of pitch in language to distinguish words. ... This article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. ... Hanyu Pinyin (Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ), commonly called Pinyin, is the most common variant of Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. ... In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ... It has been suggested that Tonal language be merged into this article or section. ...

In African languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e.g. Yoruba apá 'arm', Nobiin féntí 'sweet date', Ekoti kaláwa 'boat'. Map showing the distribution of African language families and some major African languages. ... Yoruba (native name ede Yorùbá, the Yoruba language) is a dialect continuum of West Africa with over 22 million speakers. ... Nobiin is a Northern Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. ... Ekoti (pronounced ) is a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique by about 64,200 people, the Akoti. ...

Disambiguation

The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages: Look up homograph in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

• 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".
• Dutch. It mainly distinguishes één "one" from een "a/an".
• Norwegian. In Bokmål, it is used for the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere, like in Danish: 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).
• Spanish. Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs, such as cómo (interrogative "how") and como (non-interrogative "how", comparative "like", verb "I eat"), dónde and donde "where", and some other words such as tú "you" and tu "your," él "he/him" and el ("the", masculine).

Bokmål (lit. ...

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". The word emphasis, in addition to its main dictionary meaning, may have the following techincal meanings. ...

Letter extension

• 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 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 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: 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 used to indicate that the vowel was long.

• In Turkmen, the letter Ý is a consonant: [j].

Old Norse or Danish tongue is the Germanic language once spoken by the inhabitants of the Nordic countries (for instance during the Viking Age). ... In phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (Greek δίφθογγος, diphthongos, literally with two sounds, or with two tones) is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement from one vowel to another, often interpreted by listeners as a single vowel sound or phoneme. ... n. ...

Other uses

• 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").

The cuneiform script is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. ... Look up homograph in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

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 (note that this is a false cognate, as in French "résumé" means summary and a resumé in English is a CV). A loanword (or a borrowing) is a word taken in by one language from another. ... False cognates are a pair of words in the same or different languages that are similar in form and meaning but have different roots. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ...

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. This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... Adiós is Spanish for GoodBye. ... // A coup dÉtat (pronounced ), or simply coup, is the sudden overthrow of a government, often through illegal means by a part of the state establishment — mostly replacing just the high-level figures. ... Pièce de résistance is a French term (circa 1839), translated into English literally as piece of resistance, referring to the best part or feature of something (as in a meal), a showpiece, or highlight. ... Crème brûlée Crème brûlée (French for burnt cream; IPA: in English, in French) is a dessert consisting of a rich custard base topped with a layer of hard caramel, created by burning sugar under a grill or other intense heat source. ...

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 also sometimes used for this purpose. 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. ...

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. 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. ... The term extended ASCII (or high ASCII) describes eight-bit or larger character encodings that include the standard seven-bit ASCII characters as well as others. ... Majuscules or capital letters (in the Roman alphabet: A, B, C, ...) are one type of case in a writing system. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... Combining diacritical marks are Unicode characters that are intended to modify other characters (see Diacritic). ...

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 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.

Notes

1. ^ Polish Diacritics: Kreska: Not exactly acute

See also

Letters with an acute accent

• Ć
• Ḱ
• Ś
• Ź

The acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin script. ... Ḱ ḱ (K with acute accent, Unicode U+1E30, U+1E31) is used in the following sense: transliteration of Cyrillic Kje. ... Åš (S with acute accent) Slavic: voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative Polish language In the Łacinka alphabet for the Belarusian language (сь) Indo-Aryan IAST Romany alphabet transliteration of a palatalized s in the Lydian language In Proto-Semitic, a reconstructed voiceless lateral fricative phoneme, the parent phoneme of Geez Åšat . ... The acute accent ( Â´ ) is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin script. ...

Related topics

• Grave accent
• Circumflex accent
• Double acute accent
• Kreska, in Polish orthography
• Čarka, in Czech orthography

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 ) (often called a caret, a hat or an uppen) is a diacritic mark used in written Greek, French, Dutch, Esperanto, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovak, Vietnamese, Japanese romaji, Welsh, Portuguese, Italian, Afrikaans and other languages, and formerly in Turkish [citation needed]. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus (bent... The double acute accent ( ˝ ) is a diacritic mark of the latin script used primarily in written Hungarian. ...

External links

Look up á, ć, é in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Look up í, ĺ, ḿ, ó in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• 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