The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritical A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign) is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"). Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets An alphabet is a standardized set of letters — basic written symbols or graphemes — each of which roughly represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit, and syllabaries, in which based on the Latin The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient, Cyrillic Cyrillic script is an alphabet developed in the 9th century in Bulgaria, and used in the Slavic national languages of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Ukrainian, and in the non-Slavic languages of Moldovan, Kazakh, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Tuvan, and Mongolian. It also was used in past languages of Eastern, and Greek The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is the first and oldest alphabet in the narrow sense that it notes each vowel and consonant with a separate symbol. It is as such in continuous use to this day. The letters were also used to represent scripts Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to comprehend the text. By contrast, other possible symbolic systems such as information signs, painting, maps and mathematics often do not require prior knowledge of a spoken language.

History

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex In written Latin, the apex is a mark roughly with the shape of an acute accent ( ´ ) which is placed over vowels to indicate that they are long, used in Latin Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. With the Roman conquest, Latin was spread to countries around the Mediterranean, including a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Aragonese, Corsican, Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, Spanish and others, are descended from Latin, while inscriptions to mark long vowels In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic,.

The acute accent first appeared with this name in the polytonic orthography Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography which notated Ancient Greek phonology was used until 1982, when it was supplanted by the simplified monotonic orthography, which corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics of Ancient Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (&, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words. The term has been used to describe the Scandinavian languages,. Modern Greek has a stress accent In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense instead of a pitch accent, so the diacritic is now used to mark the stressed vowel of a word.

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense of a word in several languages:

• Catalan Catalan is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencià (Valencian), as well as in the city of Alghero on the Italian island of Sardinia. It is also spoken in the. Used in stressed high vowels A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant: é, í, ó, ú.
• Dutch Dutch ( Nederlands ) is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language and over 5 million people as a second language. Most native speakers live in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, with smaller groups of speakers in parts of France, Germany and several former Dutch colonies. It is closely related to other. Used to disambiguate between words that differ only in stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur resp. prevent) or openness (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh, respectively; or één – een, meaning one resp. a) where this is not otherwise reflected in the spelling.
• Galician Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, as well as in small bordering zones in the neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castile and León and in Northern Portugal
• Lakota Lakota is a Siouan language spoken by the Lakota people of the Sioux tribes. While generally taught and considered by speakers as a separate language, Lakota is mutually understandable with the other two languages (cf. Dakota language), and is considered by most linguists one of the three major varieties of the Sioux language. The Lakota language. For example, kákhi "in that direction", but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
• Leonese The Leonese language developed from Vulgar Latin with contributions from the pre-Roman languages which were spoken in the territory of the Spanish provinces of León, Zamora, and Salamanca and in some villages in the District of Bragança, Portugal. Close to Mirandese and Asturian, it belongs to Astur-Leonese subgroup of Iberian languages. Most. Used for marking stress or disambiguation.
• Modern Greek Modern Greek refers to the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language had been present, where it marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants) word: ά (á), έ (é), ή (í), ί (í), ό (ó), ύ (ý), ώ (ó).
• Occitan Occitan is a Romance language spoken in Occitania, that is, Southern France, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, Monaco and in the Aran Valley of Spain. It is also spoken in the linguistic enclave of Guardia Piemontese . It is a co-official language in Catalonia, Spain (known as Aranese in Aran Valley). Modern Occitan is the closest relative of Catalan. Used in stressed vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
• Portuguese Portuguese ( português or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated from a fusion of the dialect spoken in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal with closely related dialects spoken in territories to the south which had not yet been reconquered by the Christians to the Arabs by the time Portugal was born as a Christian kingdom: á, é, í, ó, ú. May also indicate height (see below).
• Russian Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three living members of the East Slavic languages. Written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th. When it is required (like in dictionaries, books for children or foreigners), stress is indicated by an acute accent " ́" to distinguish between minimal pairs In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning. They are used to demonstrate that two phones constitute two separate phonemes in the language, such as зáмок ("castle") and замóк ("padlock"). Usually, though, meaning is determined by context, and no accent mark is written. The same rules apply in Ukrainian Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, Belarusian The Belarusian language, or the Belarusan is, along with Russian, the language of the Belarusians and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Prior to Belarus gaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1992, the language was called known in English as Byelorussian or Belorussian, transliterating the Russian and Bulgarian Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group languages. The acute accent can be used both in the Cyrillic and sometimes in the romanised text. However, this is not the case for Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian, less commonly known as Croato-Serbian or Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language and the native language of Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Croats and Serbs, who differ in religion and have historically lived under different empires, have adopted slightly different literary forms, Croatian and Macedonian Macedonian (македонски јазик, pronounced [maˈkɛdɔnski ˈjazik] ) is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and a member of the Eastern group of South Slavic languages. Standard Macedonian was implemented as the official language of the Socialist Republic of Macedonia in June 1945 after being codified in the 1940s and 1, as these languages have a semi-fixed stress on the second-last and/or third-last syllable, making the use of accents redundant.
• Spanish Countries where Spanish has official status. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 25% or more of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 10-20% of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 5-9.9% of the population. Used on vowels to mark stress. Occasionally it is also used to distinguish between homophones. See below.
• Norwegian Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants (see Danish language), Swedish Swedish ( svenska ) is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along the coast and on the Åland islands. It is to a considerable extent mutually intelligible with Norwegian and to a lesser extent with Danish (see especially "Classification"). Along and Danish Danish (dansk, pronounced [d̥ænˀsɡ̊] ) is one of the North Germanic languages (also called Scandinavian languages), a sub-group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by around 6 million people, mainly in Denmark; the language is also used by the 50,000 Danes in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. The acute accent is used to indicate that a terminal syllable with the vowel e is stressed, and is often written out only when it changes the meaning. For example: armen (first syllable stressed) means "the arm", while armén means "the army"; ide (both syllables stressed) means "bear's nest", while idé means "idea". Also stress related is the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét (the indefinite article and the word "one" in Danish). In this case the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object. Derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loan-words, mainly from French French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by about 136 million people worldwide. Around 190 million people speak French as a second language, and an additional 200 million speak it as an acquired foreign language. French speaking communities are present in 57 countries and territories. Most native speakers of the language live in, are also written with the acute accent, like filé and kafé.
• Welsh Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, in England by some along the Welsh border, in the Welsh immigrant colony in the Chubut Valley in Argentine Patagonia, and the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 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".

Height

The acute accent marks the height In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages extinct: Anatolian · Paleo-Balkans (Dacian, .

• To mark high vowels:
  • Spanish Countries where Spanish has official status. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 25% or more of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 10-20% of the population. States of the U.S. where Spanish has no official status but is spoken by 5-9.9% of the population. The acute accent denotes the syllable where the stress happens. It can be found only in vowels and, as many other languages, is used for diacritic purposes in some cases. By rule it is placed over vowels in certain words for marking a hiatus.
  • Catalan Catalan is a Romance language, the national and official language of Andorra, and a co-official language in the Spanish autonomous communities of Catalonia, the Balearic Islands and Valencian Community, where it is known as Valencià (Valencian), as well as in the city of Alghero on the Italian island of Sardinia. It is also spoken in the. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é [e] (as opposed to è [ɛ]), and ó [o] (as opposed to ò [ɔ]).
  • French French is a Romance language spoken as a first language by about 136 million people worldwide. Around 190 million people speak French as a second language, and an additional 200 million speak it as an acquired foreign language. French speaking communities are present in 57 countries and territories. Most native speakers of the language live in. Used only on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Dutch, French, Greek (until 1982; see polytonic orthography), Italian, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Kanien'kéha,Welsh, and other languages which is the accent the other way and distinguishes é [e] from è, ê [ɛ], and e [ə]. Unlike other Romance languages, the accent marks rarely imply stress in French as the stress is almost always on the last syllable of each word.
  • Italian Italian ( italiano , or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken as a native language by about 62 million people in Italy, San Marino and parts of Switzerland, Croatia, Slovenia and France. It is spoken as a first language by many Italian citizens and immigrants abroad, for a total of approximately 70 million native speakers. In addition, it. 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 ó. Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché "why/because"; in the conjugated copula In linguistics, a copula , also called a "passive verb" or "linking verb", is a word used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement or an adverbial). The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a link or tie that connects two different things 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 for disambiguation, for instance between bótte, "barrel", and bòtte, "beating", though this is not mandatory.
  • Occitan Occitan is a Romance language spoken in Occitania, that is, Southern France, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, Monaco and in the Aran Valley of Spain. It is also spoken in the linguistic enclave of Guardia Piemontese . It is a co-official language in Catalonia, Spain (known as Aranese in Aran Valley). Modern Occitan is the closest relative of Catalan. 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 Portuguese ( português or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated from a fusion of the dialect spoken in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal with closely related dialects spoken in territories to the south which had not yet been reconquered by the Christians to the Arabs by the time Portugal was born as a Christian kingdom. The vowels á, é, ó, are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê, ô which are stressed high vowels.

Length

The acute accent marks long vowels In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, in several languages:

• Czech Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian until the late 19th century in English. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian. To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring) A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts is used instead, to form ů.
• Hungarian: á, é, í, ó, ú are the long equivalents of the vowels a, e, i, o, u (the former two also implying a change in quality, see below), while ő, ű (see double acute accent) are the long equivalents of ö, ü.
• Irish: á, é, í, ó, ú are the long equivalents of the vowels a, e, i, o, u. The accent is known as a síneadh fada /ˌʃiːnʲə ˈfadˠə/ (length accent), usually abbreviated to fada.
• 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.
• Arabic and Persian: á, í, ú 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.

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 kreska (English: 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 háček in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. sześć [ˈʂɛɕt​͡ɕ] "six"). However, in contrast to the háček which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the kreska denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the kreska is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center.^[1] A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Lacinka. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian the letter ć is used to represent a palatalized t.

In the romanization of Macedonian, ǵ and ḱ represent the Cyrillic letters Ѓ and Ќ, which stand for palatal or alveolo-palatal consonants, though gj and kj (or đ and ć) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated Proto-Indo-European phonemes /ɡʲ/ and /kʲ/.

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 (or second) tone, the alternative for the acute accent in Mandarin is number 2 after the syllable, e.g. lái = lai2.

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 t’áá 'just'.

Disambiguation

The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages:

• 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.
• 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 η, the feminine definite article ("the"), versus ή, meaning "or".
• 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. An example is 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 use is, however, inconsistent. In Nynorsk, 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 "narrow ditch, trail by plow (all the diacritics in these examples are optional^[2]).
• 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), dónde and donde "where", 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 acento diacrítico.

Emphasis

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.

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".

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 [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 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, 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 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, as in Faroese, these are considered separate letters. A sample extract of Icelandic.

  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 was used to indicate a long vowel.
• In Turkmen, the letter Ý is a consonant: [j].

Other uses

• 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 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 résumé ("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").
• 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.^[3]
• 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/.
• In some Basque texts, the letters r and l carry acute accents, which are otherwise indicated by double letters. In such cases, ŕ is used to represent rr (a trilled r, this spelling is used only internally in words, to differentiate between -r-, an alveolar tap–in Basque /r/ in word-initial and word-final positions is always trilled) and ĺ for ll (a palatalized /l/).

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 café, fiancé, fiancée, passé, roué, sauté, 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 resumé, 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, saké, and the Maldivian capital Malé, the last two 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.

Accents are sometimes also used for poetic purposes, to indicate an unusual pronunciation: for example, spelling the word picked (normally [pɪkt]) as pickéd^{[citation needed]} to indicate the pronunciation [ˈpɪkɪd]. The grave accent is more usually used for this purpose.

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252 character encoding 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 separate character U+00B4 and a combining character, U+0301.

Because keyboards have only a limited number of keys, English keyboards do not have keys for accented characters. The concept of dead key, a key that modified the meaning of the next key press, was developed to overcome this problem. This acute accent key was already present on typewriters where it typed the accent without moving the carriage, so a normal letter could be written on the same place.

Some sites, such as Wikipedia or the Alta Vista automatic translator^[4] allow inserting such symbols by clicking on a link in a box.

Microsoft Windows

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. Before the appearance of Spanish keyboards, Spanish speakers had to learn these codes if they wanted to be able to write acute accents, though some preferred using the Microsoft Word spell checker to add the accent for them. Some young computer users got in the habit of not writing accented letters at all.^{[citation needed]} The codes (which come from the IBM PC encoding) are:

• 160 for á
• 130 for é
• 161 for í
• 162 for ó
• 163 for ú

On a non-US Keyboard layout, these letters can also be made by holding Ctrl+Alt (or Alt Gr) and the desired letter.

To input an accented letter in a Microsoft Office software (Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Access, etc.), hold the Ctrl key, press the apostrophe (') key once, release the Ctrl key, and then press the desired letter. Note: the same can be done for other diacritics symbols, for example, the grave accent (hold Ctrl, press grave accent (`) once, release Ctrl) or the tilde (hold Ctrl+Shift, press tilde (~) once, release Ctrl+Shift)^{[citation needed]}.

Macintosh OS X

On a Macintosh computer, 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.

See also

• Acute (phonetics)
• Apex (diacritic)
• Circumflex accent
• Double acute accent
• Grave accent

Notes

1. ^ Polish Diacritics: Kreska: Not exactly acute
2. ^ Norwegian language council, Diacritics (in Norwegian)
3. ^ Svonni, E Mikael (1984). Sámegiel-ruoŧagiel skuvlasátnelistu. Sámiskuvlastivra. III. ISBN 9177160088.
4. ^ Babelfish automatic translator

External links

• 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

Categories: Alphabetic diacritics

See Also:

• Rhotic and Non-rhotic Accents: Encyclopedia

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