Getting to Grips with Accent Marks in Spanish
One of the biggest differences between Spanish and English is the way Spanish spelling and orthographic rules ensure that almost every word should be pronounced exactly the way it is written. As with many of the languages which evolved from Latin and Greek, one of the ways written Spanish guides the reader’s pronunciation is through the use of orthographic symbols or diacritic marks, commonly referred to as accents.
These glyphs only appear in English when used in loan words such as café, and as such can prove tricky for English speakers when learning Spanish. It is, however, well worth taking the time to understand how and why accents are used in written Spanish. Not only will it help ensure that you pronounce words correctly but is also important for differentiating between words that have the same spelling but different pronunciation.
In this article we will look at the different accent marks used in Spanish and the ways in which they are used.
The Tilde
The tilde, also known as the acento gráfico, is by far the most frequently occurring accent mark in Spanish. Its name is derived from the Spanish verb tildar, to accentuate. The glyph itself is an oblique line from right to left placed above a vowel, e.g. á, as in Spanish it is never placed above a consonant. The tilde has several distinct roles. It can be used to:
Indicate stressed syllables,
Indicate the separation of vowels,
Differentiate between homonyms, or
Indicate an interrogative or in demonstrative pronouns.
We will look at each case separately:
Stressed Syllables
When we pronounce words with more than one syllable, one of those syllables is usually stressed or emphasized. This syllable is known as the tonic syllable. The most common use of the tilde in Spanish is to indicate which syllable is tonic and needs to be stressed by the speaker.
The vast majority of Spanish words stress the penultimate syllable*. Such words are known as paroxytones, or graves or llanas in Spanish.
Stresses graves and llanas
Graves and llanas, themselves are examples of words that follow this structure. If the tonic syllable is the penultimate, but the word ends with a consonant other N or S*, it becomes necessary to place a tilde above the main vowel in the stressed syllable. Examples of this include:
Difícil -Difficult.
Tórax – Thorax
Césped- Grass
*OJO (NOTE): Most words ending in either a vowel or the consonants N or S, do not require a tilde to indicate stress.
About twenty percent of words have irregular stresses with tonic syllables other than the penultimate.
Stresses agudas
The first group of these, known as oxytones or agudas, stress the last syllable of the word. These words require an accent over the vowel of the final syllable when they finish with a vowel, an S or N. Many of these words are past preterit conjugations of verbs and require the correct stress to differentiate them from other conjugations.
Examples include:
Habló – He/she/they(singular) spoke.
Miré – I looked.
Cenó – He/she/they(singular) dined.
If the aguda ends with another consonant it will not require an accent. Examples of this include:
Capital - Capital
Ciudad - City
Robot - Robot
Nariz - Nose
The challenge with this later group of words is that there is no orthographic mark to differentiate them from graves, meaning these words are among those mispronounced most often by learners.
Stresses esdrújulas
Esdrújulas, known as proparoxytones in English, are words where the stress and accent marks are in the antepenultimate (third to last) syllable. While these are fewer in number, several are commonly used words that are handy to know such as:
Teléfono – Telephone
Mágico – Magic
Stresses sobreesdrújulas
Some very long words fall under the grouping of sobreesdrújulas (sometimes spelled sobresdrújulas) and have the accent and stress on a tonic fourth to last syllable. Many of these are words which have been modified with suffixes such as -mente. As the accented syllable usually stays the same when a Spanish word is extended, this can result in words that do not require accent in their base form picking up the tilde when modified. This can also happen when pluralizing or even changing the gender of a word. Examples of sobreesdrújulas include:
Fácilmente – easily
Democráticamente – democratically
To indicate the separation of vowels
In general, when reading Spanish, we pronounce every letter of each word. This can be slightly different when two vowels appear together in a word. Spanish splits the vowels into two groups, the three strong vowels, A, E and O, and the two weak vowels I and U. When two strong vowels appear alongside each other in a word they should always be pronounced separately as with other letters. However, when one or both of the vowels is weak this usually indicates that the two vowels represent only one sound, known as a diphthong. Each diphthong vowel pairing has its own sound, and it is important to learn each of these.
The tilde can be used to disrupt these diphthong sounds and indicate that a vowel should be pronounced in a separate syllable to the adjacent vowel. This is known as a hiatus. Any hiatus including a weak vowel will be indicated with a tilde. Examples include:
Proteína – protein
Aún – yet/still
Frío - cold
To differentiate between homonyms
As with many languages, Spanish features a number of words that both sound and look the same as other words despite having different meanings, known as homonyms. Spanish differentiates many longer homonyms by placing stresses and accents on different syllables as described earlier in this article. In the case of short single syllable homonyms there is no difference in pronunciation, however in written Spanish, rather than leave the reader to judge through context alone, the tilde is often used to differentiate.
Learning the more common homonyms and remembering which do and do not use tildes is very important for understanding written Spanish.
* This usage of mas for the word ‘but’ is not very common
To Indicate an Interrogative
In Spanish every interrogative, or question, word features a tilde. These questions words are:
It is important to remember to include the tilde as each of these has a corresponding statement word that omits the tilde but is otherwise spelled in the same way. These can usually be used to answer the question they are linked to. For example, como, without the tilde, is similar in meaning to the English word ´like´. So it would be possible to answer the question:
¿Cómo se usan los acentos gráficos en español?
How do you use graphic accents in Spanish?
with:
Los usamos como en los ejemplos en este artículo muy interesante.
We use them like in the examples in this interesting article.
While the easiest way to explain the difference is that the version without the tilde should be used in statements, it is important to remember that Spanish uses the interrogative version of these words in both direct and indirect questions. Many indirect questions appear wholly contained within statements and thus do not have question marks. For example, if we wanted to say:
I don´t know how much money he has.
No sé cuánto dinero tiene él.
We would still use the interrogative form, as statements which express a lack of knowledge or a desire to know something contain indirect questions.
To Indicate Demonstrative Pronouns
The last use of tildes is a bit more complicated. Historically Spanish also uses tildes to indicate demonstrative pronouns, words that take the place of nouns within a sentence when indicating a specified object and differentiate them from demonstrative adjectives. However, in 1959, the Real Academia Española decreed that this would be optional going forwards and has since suggested against their usage unless there is a risk of ambiguity in the meaning of a sentence. In many countries their use continued for a while before slowly fading out. That said, it is still common to see this usage in older literature and many people continue to use them as they were taught that way in school. For this reason, it is worth understanding this usage just in case.
The only demonstrative pronouns that can feature an accent are the masculine and feminine ones:
éste/ésta (this)
ése/ésa (that)
aquél/aquélla (that)
éstos/éstas (these)
ésos/ésas (those)
aquéllos/aquéllas (those)
This is because the neuter versions, such as aquello, esto or eso, do not have an adjectival equivalent so never required any differentiation.
The Diéresis
While much less common than the tilde, you may also have come across the diéresis, two dots similar in form to the German umlaut, which sometimes appears above the letter U in Spanish. This diacritic mark only appears in a few words, all of which feature either the letter sequence GUE or GUI.
Normally when a G is followed by U in Spanish the vowel is virtually silent, serving only to ensure that G is pronounced as hard sound such as in guerra (war), rather the soft sound used to pronounce words like gemelo (twin). When the diaeresis is added above the U, it informs the reader that the U needs to be pronounced, which when combined with G gives a sound similar to what would be produced by combining the letters G and W and in English. Examples of this include:
Vergüenza – shame
Antigüedad – antiquity
Pingüino – penguin
Nicaragüense – Nicaraguan
The Virgulilla
The virgulilla is the name given to the diacritic mark appearing above the N in the Spanish letter Ñ pronounced /en yeh/. This is by far the easiest of the Spanish accent marks to understand as its only function is to differentiate between the two separate letters. While N is pronounced similarly to English Ñ is pronounced nyah such as in the very word español.
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