History An early precursor of the acute accent was the
apex, used in
Latin inscriptions to mark
long vowels. The acute accent was first used in French in 1530 by
Geoffroy Tory, the royal printer.
Pitch Ancient Greek The acute accent was first used in the
polytonic orthography of
Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high
pitch. In Modern Greek, a
stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is (
oxeîa, Modern Greek
oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was
calqued (loan-translated) into
Latin as "sharpened".
Stress The acute accent marks the
stressed vowel of a word in several languages: •
Asturian •
Belarusian As follows: , , , , , , , , . •
Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word, for example,
soyópokistsi (). •
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 and Ukrainian, which use the acute accent. •
Catalan uses it in stressed vowels:
é,
í,
ó,
ú. •
Dutch uses it to mark stress (
vóórkomen –
voorkómen, meaning
occur and
prevent respectively) or a more
closed vowel (
hé –
hè, equivalent to English
hey and
heh) if it is not clear from context. Sometimes, it is simply used for disambiguation, as in
één –
een, meaning "one" and "a(n)". •
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" ("open" or "wide" vowel, as in "pen") and
pésca "fishing" ("closed" or "narrow" vowel, as in "pain"). However, in some regional accents, these words can be pronouned the same way, or even with opposite values. •
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: (
á), (
é), (
í), (
í), (
ó), (
í), (
ó). •
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 (first syllable stressed) means "the arm" while
armé(e)n means "the army";
ide (first syllable stressed) means "bear's den" in Swedish, while
idé means "idea". Also stress-related are the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét (the indefinite article and the word "one" in Danish and Norwegian). 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(s) een and eet. Some loanwords, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, such as Norwegian and Swedish
kafé and Danish
café (also
cafe). •
Occitan •
Portuguese:
á,
é,
í,
ó,
ú. It may also indicate height (see below). •
Russian. Syllabic stress is irregular in Russian, and in reference and teaching materials (dictionaries and books for children or foreigners), stress is indicated by an acute accent above the stressed vowel, e.g.
соба́ка (, dog), as follows: , , , , , , , , . The acute accent can be used both in the Cyrillic and sometimes in the romanised text. •
Spanish marks stressed syllables in polysyllabic words that deviate from the
standardized stress patterns. In monosyllabic words, it is used to distinguish homophones, e.g.:
el (the) and
él (he). •
Tagalog dictionaries including other
Philippine languages use the acute accent to mark a vowel in a syllable with lexical stress
(Diín) and avoid ambiguity. Combinations include á, í, ó, and ú while é is the rarest one. Since they are not part of the official alphabet, these vowels do not affect the order of each letter. Vowels with a stress at the first syllable are left unwritten and serves as the default word. For example,
baka (cow) and
baká (maybe). •
Ukrainian: sometimes added to mark syllabic stress, when it can help to distinguish between
homographs: vs. , as follows: , , , , , , , , . Commonly used in dictionaries, readers, and some children's books. •
Welsh: word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) 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: "to hate", "cigarette", "umbrella".
Height The acute accent marks the
height of some stressed vowels in various
Romance languages. • To mark high vowels: •
Bislama. One of the two orthographies distinguishes
é from
e . The orthography after 1995 does not distinguish these sounds, and has no diacritics. •
Catalan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels
é (as opposed to
è ), and
ó (as opposed to
ò ). •
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 in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French. •
Italian. The acute accent (sometimes called
accento chiuso, "closed accent" in Italian) is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel (and a few other words). Words ending in stressed -o or -a are never marked with an acute accent (
ó or
á), but with a
grave accent (
ò or
à). Therefore, only
é and
è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in
-ché, such as
perché ("why/because"); in the conjugated
copula è ("is"); in ambiguous monosyllables such as
né ('neither')
vs. ne ('of it') and
sé ('itself')
vs. se ('if'); and some verb forms,
e.g. poté ("he/she/it could" (past tense)). The symbol
ó can be used in the body of a word for disambiguation, for instance between
bótte ("barrel") and
bòtte ("beating"), 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 (as opposed to
è ),
ó (as opposed to
ò ) and
á (as opposed to
à ). •
Scottish Gaelic (a
Celtic rather than Romance language) 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 (
i and
u) only appear either without an accent or with a grave. Since the 1980s the
SQA (which sets school standards and thus the
de facto standard language) and most publishers have abandoned the acute accent, using
grave accents in all situations (analogous to
the use of the acute in Irish). 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: 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: sometimes used to represent the
apex in modern orthography. •
Czech: are the long versions of . The accent is known as . To indicate a long in the middle or at the end of a word, a ("ring") is used instead, to form . •
Hungarian: are the long equivalents of the vowels . (see
double acute accent) are the long equivalents of . Both types of accents are known as ( means long). The letters and are the long equivalents of and respectively, but they are also distinct in quality: [aː] and [eː] rather than *[ɒː] and *[ɛ:] (see below in
Letter extension). •
Irish: are the long equivalents of the vowels , the accent affects pronunciation and meaning, e.g. ("John") but ("old"). The accent is known as a ("long (sign)"), which is also used in
Hiberno-English. •
Old Norse: are the long versions of . Sometimes, is used as the long version of , but is used more often. Sometimes, the short-lived
Old Icelandic long (also written ) 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 in Slovak. In addition to the long vowels , dĺžeň is used to mark
syllabic consonants , which are the long counterparts of syllabic .
Short vowels •
Ligurian: in the official orthography,
é is used for short , and
ó is used for short .
Palatalization A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a
palatalized sound in several languages. In
Polish, such a mark is known as a '''''' ("stroke") and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates
palatalization, similar to the use of the in
Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. "six"). However, in contrast to the which is usually used for
postalveolar consonants, the denotes
alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish
typography, the is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center. A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet . However, for computer use,
Unicode conflates the
codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance. In
Serbo-Croatian, as in Polish, the letter is used to represent a
voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate . In the
romanization of
Macedonian, and represent the
Cyrillic letters (
Gje) and (
Kje), which stand for
palatal or
alveolo-palatal consonants, though and (or and ) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated
Proto-Indo-European phonemes and . uses the acute for palatalization as in Polish: . Lower also uses , and Lower previously used and , also written as ; these are now spelt as and .
Tone In the
Quốc Ngữ system for
Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for
Cantonese, the
Pinyin romanization for
Mandarin Chinese, and the
Bopomofo semi-syllabary, the acute accent indicates a rising
tone. In Mandarin, the alternative to the acute accent is the number 2 after the syllable: lái = lai2. In
Cantonese Yale, the acute accent is either tone 2, or tone 5 if the vowel(s) are followed by 'h' (if the number form is used, 'h' is omitted): má = ma2, máh = ma5. In
African languages and
Athabaskan languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e.g.,
Yoruba apá 'arm',
Nobiin féntí 'sweet date',
Ekoti kaláwa 'boat',
Navajo tʼáá 'just'. The acute accent is used in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.
Disambiguation The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be
homographs in the following languages: •
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(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". 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 ("the"), versus , meaning "or". Other cases include ("who"/"which") versus ("where") and ("that", as in "he told me
that...") versus ("how"). •
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 (preposition "for" as in English),
fôr "feed"
n./"lining", or
fòr (only in
Nynorsk) "narrow ditch, trail by plow" (all the diacritics in these examples are optional.) •
Russian. Acute accents (technically,
stress marks) are used in dictionaries to indicate the stressed syllable. They may also be optionally used to disambiguate both between
minimal pairs, such as за́мок (read as zámak, means "castle") and замо́к (read as zamók, means "lock"), and between
question words and
relative pronouns such as что ("what", stressed, or "that", unstressed), 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 (interrogative "how") and
como (non-interrogative "how", comparative "like", "I eat"), differentiates
qué (what) from
que (that), and some other words such as
tú "you" and
tu "your,"
té "tea" and
te "you" (direct/indirect object),
él "he/him" and
el ("the", masculine). 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 (there), 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. The
IJ digraph can be stressed with íj́ but is usually stressed as íj for technical reasons. • 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 (a, i, o, u and y), 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 (short) vowel
a is
open back rounded (ɒ), but
á is
open front unrounded (a) (and long). • :Similarly, the (short) vowel
e is
open-mid front unrounded (ɛ), while (long)
é is
close-mid front unrounded (e). • :Despite this difference, in most of the cases, these two pairs are arranged as equal in
collation, just like the other pairs (see above) that only differ in length. • In
Icelandic the acute accent is used on all 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), 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 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: , whereas the letter
y is a vowel: [ɯ].
Other uses • In some
Basque texts predating
Standard Basque, the letters and carry acute accents (an invention by
Sabino Arana), which are otherwise indicated by double letters. In such cases, is used to represent (a trilled , this spelling is used even at the end of a syllable, to differentiate from --, an alveolar tap in Basque in word-final positions is always trilled) and for (a palatalized ). • 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,
é ó denote both length and height, representing [e, o]. • 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 (
Áá, Čč, Đđ, Ŋŋ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž) 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 ("café") and
resumé ("résumé", 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"). • and are used in
Pashto in the Latin alphabet, equivalent to and , respectively. • In
Romagnol,
é ó denote both length and height, representing [eː, oː]. • The Q with an acute accent is a grapheme used in Wayne Gill's
Chimane alphabet. The letter is used in the digraph .
English As with other diacritical marks, a number of (usually
French)
loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent as used in the original language: these include
attaché,
blasé,
canapé,
cliché,
communiqué,
café,
décor,
déjà vu,
détente,
élite,
entrée,
exposé,
mêlée,
fiancé,
fiancée,
papier-mâché,
passé,
pâté,
piqué,
plié,
repoussé,
résumé,
risqué,
sauté,
roué,
séance,
naïveté and
touché. 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 '''', with only one accent (but also with both or none). Acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final
e is not
silent, for example,
maté from Spanish
mate, the Maldivian capital
Malé, saké from Japanese
sake, and
Pokémon from the Japanese compound for
pocket monster, the last three from languages which do not use the Roman alphabet, and where transcriptions do not normally use acute accents. 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, ''
coup d'état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée and ancien régime''. The acute accent is sometimes (though rarely) used for poetic purposes: • It can mark stress on an unusual syllable: for example,
caléndar to indicate (rather than the standard ). • It can disambiguate stress where the distinction is metrically important: for example,
rébel (as opposed to
rebél), 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 (the
grave accent is more common for this last purpose). The layout of some European PC keyboards, combined with problematic keyboard-driver semantics, causes some users to use an acute accent or a grave accent instead of an apostrophe when typing in English (e.g. typing or instead of John's). == Typographic form ==