The acute accent (�) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Portuguese, Catalan, Greek, Welsh, Faroese, Icelandic, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Dutch, Irish Gaelic, Croatian, Navajo and other languages.

Openness

In French and Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan, 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. E.g., in Spanish �nimo ["a-ni-mo] ("mood, spirit"), animo [a-"ni-mo] ("I cheer"), and anim� [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.

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 c�mo & como (how), d�nde & donde (where), and some other words such as t� (you) & tu (your), �l (he/him) & el (the); in Dutch, mainly ��n (one) & een (a/an), and v��r (before) & voor (for).

In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence.

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 Swedish, the acute accent is also used only on the letter e, mostly in words of French origin and in some names, and mostly on the last syllable of a word. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel sound, same as in French, and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include resum� (accent on the last e only!) and Linn� (the title taken by 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.

The use of the acute (see also h�ček) 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, Latvians, Hungarians, Icelandians 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.

Palatalization

In Polish, the acute accent is used over several letters - consonants and one vowel. Over the consonants, it is used to indicate palatalization, rather as the h�ček is used in Czech and other Slavic languages; eg. sześć [ʃεɕʨ] (six)(though the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute). Over the vowel "�" it indicates pronunciation change into /u/.

Other uses

In Vietnamese and some other tonal languages, the acute accent is used to indicate a rising tone.

In Irish Gaelic, the acute accent, known as a s�neadh fada (pronounced SHEE-na FA-da), is a sign of lenition and denotes a long vowel as opposed to a short one.

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 s� transliterates the second sign with the value /su/.

In Faroese, the acute accent is used on 5 of the vowels (a, i, o, u and y), but these letters, �, �, �, � and � are considered separate letters with separate pronunciations.

• �: long /Oa/, short /O/ and before /a/: /o~/
• �/�: long /Ui:/, short /Ui/
• �: long /Ou/, /Eu/ or /9u/, short: /9/, except Su�uroy: /O/
  • When � is followed by the skerping -gv, it's pronunced /E/, except in Su�uroy where it's /O/
• �: long /}u/, short /Y/
  • When � is followed by the skerping -gv, it's pronunced /I/

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.

• �: /au(:)/
• �: /jE(:)/
• �/�: /i(:)/
• �: /ou(:)/
• �: /u(:)/

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 saut�, rou�, caf�, touch�, fianc�, and fianc�e. Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending � or �e, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word r�sum� is commonly seen in English as resum�, with only one accent.

The word acute is derived from the Latin acutus (sharp), itself a translation of the Greek oxys (ὀξύς).

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters �, �, �, �, �, �, 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.

See also

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

External links

• difference between kreska and acute (http://www.twardoch.com/download/polishhowto/kreska.html)