Acute accent

The acute accent is a diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

 used in many modern written languages with alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which 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...

s based on the Latin

Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...

, Cyrillic

Cyrillic alphabet

The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...

, and Greek

Greek alphabet

The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...

 script

Writing system

A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...

s.

Apex

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex

Apex (diacritic)

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.The shape and length of the apex can vary, sometimes within a single inscription...

, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels

Vowel length

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...

.

Greek

The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography

Greek diacritics

Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography notates Ancient Greek phonology...

 of Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek

Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...

, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch

Pitch accent

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...

. In Modern Greek, a stress accent

Stress (linguistics)

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.The stress placed...

 has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accent was oxeîa (Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calque

Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...

d into Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 as acūta "sharpened".

Croatian

The acute accent is used in Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.

Stress

The acute accent marks the stressed vowel

Stress (linguistics)

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.The stress placed...

 of a word in several languages:

• Catalan
  Catalan language
  Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only 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 Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
  
  , where it is used in stressed vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
• Dutch
  Dutch language
  Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
  
  . The acute is used to mark stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur and prevent) or a more closed vowel (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh), where this is not clear from context. Sometimes it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a(n)".
• Galician
  Galician language
  Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
  
  
• Lakota
  Lakota language
  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 , and is considered by most linguists one of the three major varieties of the Sioux...
  
  . For example, kákhi "in that direction", but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
• Leonese
  Leonese language
  The Leonese language is the endonym term used to refer to all vernacular Romance dialects of the Astur-Leonese linguistic group in the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora; Astur-Leonese also includes the dialects...
  
  , where it is used for marking stress or disambiguation.
• Modern Greek
  Modern Greek
  Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language 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...
  
  , where it marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic
  Syllable
  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 with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
  
   word: ά (á), έ (é), ή (í), ί (í), ό (ó), ύ (ý), ώ (ó).
• Occitan, where it is used in stressed vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
• Portuguese
  Portuguese language
  Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
  
  : á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height (see below).
• Russian
  Russian language
  Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
  
  . Stress is irregular in Russian, and in the reference and teaching materials (dictionaries, books for children or foreigners) stress is indicated by an acute accent " ́" above the stressed vowel. 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
  Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
  
   and Macedonian
  Macedonian language
  Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
  
  , as these languages have a semi-fixed stress on the second-last and/or third-last syllable, making the use of accents redundant.
• Spanish
  Spanish language
  Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
  
   where it is used on vowels to mark stress in words not following the default stress pattern. Occasionally it is also used to distinguish between homophones. See below.
• Norwegian
  Norwegian language
  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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
  
  , Swedish
  Swedish language
  Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
  
   and Danish
  Danish language
  Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
  
  . 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 armé(e)n means "the army"; ide (first syllable stressed) means "bear's nest", 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). In this case the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object. This derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loan-words, mainly from French
  French language
  French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
  
  , are also written with the acute accent, like filé and kafé.
• Welsh
  Welsh language
  Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
  
  . 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 of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

.

• To mark high vowels:
  • Catalan
    Catalan language
    Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only 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 Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
    
    . 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 language
    French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
    
    . The acute is used only on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave
    Grave accent
    The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
    
     which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes é [e] from è [ɛ], ê [ɛ], and e [ə]. Unlike in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
  • Italian
    Italian language
    Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
    
    . The acute accent (sometimes called accento chiuso, "close accent" in Italian) 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 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. 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 language
    Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
    
    . The vowels á, é, ó, are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê, 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. For example: Água, Aquário, País.

Length

The acute accent marks long vowels in several languages:

• Arabic
  Arabic language
  Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
  
   and Persian
  Persian language
  Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
  
  : á, í, ú were used in western transliteration
  Transliteration
  Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
  
   of Islamic language texts from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Representing the long vowels, they are typically transcribed with a macron
  Macron
  A macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
  
   today.
• Czech
  Czech language
  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 in English until the late 19th century...
  
  . To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring)
  Ring (diacritic)
  A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.-Ring above:...
  
   is used instead, to form ů.
• Hungarian
  Hungarian language
  Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
  
  : 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
  Double acute accent
  The double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to as Hungarumlaut, a portmanteau of Hungarian umlaut...
  
  ) are the long equivalents of ö, ü.
• Irish
  Irish language
  Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
  
  : 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.
• Old Norse
  Old Norse
  Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
  
  : á, é, í, ó, ú, ý are the long versions of a, e, i, o, u, y. Sometimes is used as the long version of , but is used more often. Sometimes the short-lived Old Icelandic long
  {{refimprove|date=January 2011}}{{Diacritical marks|´}}
  {{Letters with acute}}
  The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic
  Diacritic
  A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
  
   used in many modern written languages with alphabet
  Alphabet
  An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which 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...
  
  s based on the Latin
  Latin alphabet
  The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
  
  , Cyrillic
  Cyrillic alphabet
  The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
  
  , and Greek
  Greek alphabet
  The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
  
   script
  Writing system
  A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
  
  s.
  

  Apex

  
  An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex
  Apex (diacritic)
  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.The shape and length of the apex can vary, sometimes within a single inscription...
  
  , used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels
  Vowel length
  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...
  
  .
  

  Greek

  
  {{See also|Ancient Greek accent}}
  The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography
  Greek diacritics
  Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography notates Ancient Greek phonology...
  
   of Ancient Greek
  Ancient Greek
  Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
  
  , where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch
  Pitch accent
  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...
  
  . In Modern Greek, a stress accent
  Stress (linguistics)
  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.The stress placed...
  
   has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accent was oxeîa (Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calque
  Calque
  In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
  
  d into Latin
  Latin
  Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
  
   as acūta "sharpened".
  

  Croatian

  
  The acute accent is used in Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.
  

  Stress

  
  The acute accent marks the stressed vowel
  Stress (linguistics)
  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.The stress placed...
  
   of a word in several languages:
  • Catalan
    Catalan language
    Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only 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 Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
    
    , where it is used in stressed vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
  • Dutch
    Dutch language
    Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
    
    . The acute is used to mark stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur and prevent) or a more closed vowel (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh), where this is not clear from context. Sometimes it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a(n)".
  • Galician
    Galician language
    Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
    
    
  • Lakota
    Lakota language
    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 , and is considered by most linguists one of the three major varieties of the Sioux...
    
    . For example, kákhi "in that direction", but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
  • Leonese
    Leonese language
    The Leonese language is the endonym term used to refer to all vernacular Romance dialects of the Astur-Leonese linguistic group in the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora; Astur-Leonese also includes the dialects...
    
    , where it is used for marking stress or disambiguation.
  • Modern Greek
    Modern Greek
    Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language 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...
    
    , where it marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic
    Syllable
    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 with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
    
     word: ά (á), έ (é), ή (í), ί (í), ό (ó), ύ (ý), ώ (ó).
  • Occitan, where it is used in stressed vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
  • Portuguese
    Portuguese language
    Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
    
    : á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height (see below).
  • Russian
    Russian language
    Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
    
    . Stress is irregular in Russian, and in the reference and teaching materials (dictionaries, books for children or foreigners) stress is indicated by an acute accent " ́" above the stressed vowel. 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
    Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
    
     and Macedonian
    Macedonian language
    Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
    
    , as these languages have a semi-fixed stress on the second-last and/or third-last syllable, making the use of accents redundant.
  • Spanish
    Spanish language
    Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
    
     where it is used on vowels to mark stress in words not following the default stress pattern. Occasionally it is also used to distinguish between homophones. See below.
  • Norwegian
    Norwegian language
    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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
    
    , Swedish
    Swedish language
    Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
    
     and Danish
    Danish language
    Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
    
    . 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 armé(e)n means "the army"; ide (first syllable stressed) means "bear's nest", 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). In this case the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object. This derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loan-words, mainly from French
    French language
    French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
    
    , are also written with the acute accent, like filé and kafé.
  • Welsh
    Welsh language
    Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
    
    . 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 of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages
  Romance languages
  The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
  
  .
  • To mark high vowels:
    • Catalan
      Catalan language
      Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only 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 Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
      
      . 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 language
      French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
      
      . The acute is used only on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave
      Grave accent
      The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
      
       which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes é [e] from è [ɛ], ê [ɛ], and e [ə]. Unlike in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
    • Italian
      Italian language
      Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
      
      . The acute accent (sometimes called accento chiuso, "close accent" in Italian) 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 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. 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 language
      Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
      
      . The vowels á, é, ó, are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê, 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. For example: Água, Aquário, País.
  
  

  Length

  
  The acute accent marks long vowels in several languages:
  • Arabic
    Arabic language
    Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
    
     and Persian
    Persian language
    Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
    
    : á, í, ú were used in western transliteration
    Transliteration
    Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
    
     of Islamic language texts from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Representing the long vowels, they are typically transcribed with a macron
    Macron
    A macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
    
     today.
  • Czech
    Czech language
    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 in English until the late 19th century...
    
    . To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring)
    Ring (diacritic)
    A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.-Ring above:...
    
     is used instead, to form ů.
  • Hungarian
    Hungarian language
    Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
    
    : 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
    Double acute accent
    The double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to as Hungarumlaut, a portmanteau of Hungarian umlaut...
    
    ) are the long equivalents of ö, ü.
  • Irish
    Irish language
    Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
    
    : 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.
  • Old Norse
    Old Norse
    Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
    
    : á, é, í, ó, ú, ý are the long versions of a, e, i, o, u, y. Sometimes {{unicode|⟨ǿ⟩}} is used as the long version of {{unicode|⟨ø⟩}}, but {{unicode|⟨œ⟩}} is used more often. Sometimes the short-lived Old Icelandic long
    {{refimprove|date=January 2011}}{{Diacritical marks|´}}
    {{Letters with acute}}
    The acute accent ( ´ ) is a diacritic
    Diacritic
    A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
    
     used in many modern written languages with alphabet
    Alphabet
    An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which 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...
    
    s based on the Latin
    Latin alphabet
    The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
    
    , Cyrillic
    Cyrillic alphabet
    The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
    
    , and Greek
    Greek alphabet
    The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
    
     script
    Writing system
    A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
    
    s.
    

    Apex

    
    An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex
    Apex (diacritic)
    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.The shape and length of the apex can vary, sometimes within a single inscription...
    
    , used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels
    Vowel length
    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...
    
    .
    

    Greek

    
    {{See also|Ancient Greek accent}}
    The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography
    Greek diacritics
    Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography notates Ancient Greek phonology...
    
     of Ancient Greek
    Ancient Greek
    Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
    
    , where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch
    Pitch accent
    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...
    
    . In Modern Greek, a stress accent
    Stress (linguistics)
    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.The stress placed...
    
     has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accent was oxeîa (Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calque
    Calque
    In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...
    
    d into Latin
    Latin
    Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
    
     as acūta "sharpened".
    

    Croatian

    
    The acute accent is used in Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.
    

    Stress

    
    The acute accent marks the stressed vowel
    Stress (linguistics)
    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.The stress placed...
    
     of a word in several languages:
    • Catalan
      Catalan language
      Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only 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 Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
      
      , where it is used in stressed vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
    • Dutch
      Dutch language
      Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
      
      . The acute is used to mark stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur and prevent) or a more closed vowel (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh), where this is not clear from context. Sometimes it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a(n)".
    • Galician
      Galician language
      Galician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, where it is co-official with Castilian Spanish, as well as in border zones of the neighbouring territories of Asturias and Castile and León.Modern Galician and...
      
      
    • Lakota
      Lakota language
      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 , and is considered by most linguists one of the three major varieties of the Sioux...
      
      . For example, kákhi "in that direction", but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
    • Leonese
      Leonese language
      The Leonese language is the endonym term used to refer to all vernacular Romance dialects of the Astur-Leonese linguistic group in the Spanish provinces of León and Zamora; Astur-Leonese also includes the dialects...
      
      , where it is used for marking stress or disambiguation.
    • Modern Greek
      Modern Greek
      Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language 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...
      
      , where it marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic
      Syllable
      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 with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
      
       word: ά (á), έ (é), ή (í), ί (í), ό (ó), ύ (ý), ώ (ó).
    • Occitan, where it is used in stressed vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú.
    • Portuguese
      Portuguese language
      Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
      
      : á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height (see below).
    • Russian
      Russian language
      Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
      
      . Stress is irregular in Russian, and in the reference and teaching materials (dictionaries, books for children or foreigners) stress is indicated by an acute accent " ́" above the stressed vowel. 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
      Serbo-Croatian or Serbo-Croat, less commonly Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian , is a South Slavic language with multiple standards and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro...
      
       and Macedonian
      Macedonian language
      Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
      
      , as these languages have a semi-fixed stress on the second-last and/or third-last syllable, making the use of accents redundant.
    • Spanish
      Spanish language
      Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
      
       where it is used on vowels to mark stress in words not following the default stress pattern. Occasionally it is also used to distinguish between homophones. See below.
    • Norwegian
      Norwegian language
      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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
      
      , Swedish
      Swedish language
      Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
      
       and Danish
      Danish language
      Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
      
      . 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 armé(e)n means "the army"; ide (first syllable stressed) means "bear's nest", 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). In this case the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object. This derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loan-words, mainly from French
      French language
      French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
      
      , are also written with the acute accent, like filé and kafé.
    • Welsh
      Welsh language
      Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
      
      . 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 of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages
    Romance languages
    The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
    
    .
    • To mark high vowels:
      • Catalan
        Catalan language
        Catalan is a Romance language, the national and only 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 Valencian , as well as in the city of Alghero, on the Italian island...
        
        . 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 language
        French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
        
        . The acute is used only on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave
        Grave accent
        The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
        
         which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes é [e] from è [ɛ], ê [ɛ], and e [ə]. Unlike in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
      • Italian
        Italian language
        Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
        
        . The acute accent (sometimes called accento chiuso, "close accent" in Italian) 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 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. 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 language
        Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
        
        . The vowels á, é, ó, are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê, 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. For example: Água, Aquário, País.
    
    

    Length

    
    The acute accent marks long vowels in several languages:
    • Arabic
      Arabic language
      Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
      
       and Persian
      Persian language
      Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
      
      : á, í, ú were used in western transliteration
      Transliteration
      Transliteration is a subset of the science of hermeneutics. It is a form of translation, and is the practice of converting a text from one script into another...
      
       of Islamic language texts from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Representing the long vowels, they are typically transcribed with a macron
      Macron
      A macron, from the Greek , meaning "long", is a diacritic placed above a vowel . It was originally used to mark a long or heavy syllable in Greco-Roman metrics, but now marks a long vowel...
      
       today.
    • Czech
      Czech language
      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 in English until the late 19th century...
      
      . To indicate a long u in the middle or at the end of a word, a kroužek (ring)
      Ring (diacritic)
      A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.-Ring above:...
      
       is used instead, to form ů.
    • Hungarian
      Hungarian language
      Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
      
      : 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
      Double acute accent
      The double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to as Hungarumlaut, a portmanteau of Hungarian umlaut...
      
      ) are the long equivalents of ö, ü.
    • Irish
      Irish language
      Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
      
      : 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.
    • Old Norse
      Old Norse
      Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
      
      : á, é, í, ó, ú, ý are the long versions of a, e, i, o, u, y. Sometimes {{unicode|⟨ǿ⟩}} is used as the long version of {{unicode|⟨ø⟩}}, but {{unicode|⟨œ⟩}} is used more often. Sometimes the short-lived Old Icelandic long {{unicode (also written {{unicode|⟨ö⟩}}) is written using an acute-accented form, {{unicode|⟨ǫ́⟩}}, or a version with a macron, {{unicode|⟨ǭ⟩}}, but more often it is not distinguished from {{unicode|⟨á⟩}}, from which it is derived by u-mutation.
    • Slovak
      Slovak language
      Slovak , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages .Slovak is the official language of Slovakia, where it is spoken by 5 million people...
      
      . This language has in addition to the long vowels á, é, í, ó, ú and ý 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
      Syllabic consonant
      A syllabic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. The diacritic for this in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the under-stroke, ⟨⟩...
      
       r and l, only longer.
    
    

    Palatalization

    
    A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized
    Palatalization
    In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
    
     sound in several languages.
    
    In Polish
    Polish language
    Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
    
    , such a mark is known as a kreska (stroke) and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization
    Palatalization
    In linguistics, palatalization , also palatization, may refer to two different processes by which a sound, usually a consonant, comes to be produced with the tongue in a position in the mouth near the palate....
    
    , similar to the use of the háček in Czech
    Czech language
    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 in English until the late 19th century...
    
     and other Slavic languages (e.g. sześć ˈʂɛɕtɕ "six"). However, in contrast to the háček which is usually used for postalveolar consonant
    Postalveolar consonant
    Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...
    
    s, the kreska denotes alveolo-palatal consonant
    Alveolo-palatal consonant
    In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate...
    
    s. In traditional Polish typography
    Typography
    Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading , adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters...
    
    , the kreska is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center. A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Lacinka. However, for computer use, Unicode
    Unicode
    Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
    
     conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.
    
    In Bosnian
    Bosnian language
    Bosnian is a South Slavic language, spoken by Bosniaks. As a standardized form of the Shtokavian dialect, it is one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina....
    
    , Croatian
    Croatian language
    Croatian is the collective name for the standard language and dialects spoken by Croats, principally in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serbian province of Vojvodina and other neighbouring countries...
    
     and Serbian
    Serbian language
    Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
    
     the letter ć is used to represent a palatalized t.
    
    In the romanization
    Romanization
    In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
    
     of Macedonian
    Macedonian language
    Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...
    
    , ǵ and ḱ represent the Cyrillic
    Cyrillic alphabet
    The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
    
     letters ѓ
    Gje
    Gje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It is used in Macedonian to represent the voiced palatal plosive or the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate , similar to the pronunciation of ⟨j⟩ in "jet"....
    
     and ќ
    Kje
    Kje is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, used only in the Macedonian alphabet, where it It represents the voiceless palatal plosive , or the voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate . Kje is the 24th letter In this alphabet...
    
    , which stand for palatal
    Palatal consonant
    Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate...
    
     or alveolo-palatal
    Alveolo-palatal consonant
    In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants are palatalized postalveolar sounds, usually fricatives and affricates, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate...
    
     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
    Proto-Indo-European language
    The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...
    
     phoneme
    Phoneme
    In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
    
    s /ɡʲ/ and /kʲ/.
    

    Tone

    
    In the Quốc Ngữ system for Vietnamese
    Vietnamese language
    Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
    
     and the Pinyin
    Pinyin
    Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into...
    
     romanization
    Romanization
    In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
    
     for Mandarin Chinese, the acute accent indicates a rising tone
    Tone (linguistics)
    Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
    
    . In Mandarin, the alternative to the acute accent is the number 2 after the syllable: lái = lai2.
    
    In African languages
    African languages
    There are over 2100 and by some counts over 3000 languages spoken natively in Africa in several major language families:*Afro-Asiatic spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel...
    
     and Athabaskan languages
    Athabaskan languages
    Athabaskan or Athabascan is a large group of indigenous peoples of North America, located in two main Southern and Northern groups in western North America, and of their language family...
    
    , it frequently marks a high tone, e.g., Yoruba
    Yoruba language
    Yorùbá is a Niger–Congo language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million speakers. The native tongue of the Yoruba people, it is spoken, among other languages, in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo and in communities in other parts of Africa, Europe and the Americas...
    
     apá 'arm', Nobiin
    Nobiin language
    Nobiin is a Northern Nubian language of the Nilo-Saharan phylum. ‘Nobiin’ is the genitive form of Nòòbíí ‘Nubian" and literally means ‘ of the Nubians"...
    
     féntí 'sweet date', Ekoti
    Ekoti language
    The Koti language, or Ekoti , is a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique by about 64,200 people, the Koti people . Koti is spoken on Koti Island and is also the major language of Angoche, the capital of the district with the same name in the province of Nampula.In terms of genetic classification,...
    
     kaláwa 'boat', Navajo
    Navajo language
    Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...
    
     t’áá 'just'.
    

    Disambiguation

    
    The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homograph
    Homograph
    A homograph is a word or a group of words that share the same written form but have different meanings. When spoken, the meanings may be distinguished by different pronunciations, in which case the words are also heteronyms. Words with the same writing and pronunciation A homograph (from the ,...
    
    s in the following languages:
    • Danish
      Danish language
      Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
      
      . 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
      Modern Greek
      Modern Greek refers to the varieties of the Greek language 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...
      
      . 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". Other cases include που ("who"/"which") versus πού ("where") and πως ("that", as in "he told me that...") versus πώς ("how").
    • Norwegian
      Norwegian language
      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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
      
      . 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
      Nynorsk
      Nynorsk or New Norwegian is one of two official written standards for the Norwegian language, the other being Bokmål. The standard language was created by Ivar Aasen during the mid-19th century, to provide a Norwegian alternative to the Danish language which was commonly written in Norway at the...
      
      ) "narrow ditch, trail by plow (all the diacritics in these examples are optional).
    • Spanish
      Spanish language
      Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
      
      . Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs where the first is stressed and the second is a clitic
      Clitic
      In morphology and syntax, a clitic is a morpheme that is grammatically independent, but phonologically dependent on another word or phrase. It is pronounced like an affix, but works at the phrase level...
      
      , 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.
    • Russian
      Russian language
      Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
      
      . Acute accent (technically, a stress mark) may be used to disambiguate both between minimal pair
      Minimal pair
      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 distinct meanings...
      
      s, such as за́мок (read as zámak, means "castle") and замо́к (read as zamok, means "padlock"), and between question words
      Interrogative word
      In linguistics, an interrogative word is a function word used for the item interrupted in an information statement. Interrogative words are sometimes called wh-words because most of English interrogative words start with wh-...
      
       and relative pronoun
      Relative pronoun
      A relative pronoun is a pronoun that marks a relative clause within a larger sentence. It is called a relative pronoun because it relates the relative clause to the noun that it modifies. In English, the relative pronouns are: who, whom, whose, whosever, whosesoever, which, and, in some...
      
      s such as что ("what", stressed, or "that", unstressed), similarly to Spanish. Usually, though, meaning is determined by context and no stress mark is written. The same rules apply to Ukrainian
      Ukrainian language
      Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses a variant of the Cyrillic alphabet....
      
      , Rusyn
      Rusyn language
      Rusyn , also known in English as Ruthenian, is an East Slavic language variety spoken by the Rusyns of Central Europe. Some linguists treat it as a distinct language and it has its own ISO 639-3 code; others treat it as a dialect of Ukrainian...
      
      , Belarusian
      Belarusian language
      The Belarusian language , sometimes referred to as White Russian or White Ruthenian, is the language of the Belarusian people...
      
       and Bulgarian
      Bulgarian language
      Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
      
      .
    
    

    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
    Danish language
    Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
    
    , the acute accent can also be used for emphasis
    Emphasis
    Emphasis or emphatic may refer to:* Emphasis , intentional alteration of the amplitude-vs.-frequency characteristics of the signal to reduce adverse effects of noise...
    
    , 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".
    

    Letter extension

    • In Faroese
      Faroese alphabet
      The Faroese alphabet consists of 29 letters derived from the Latin alphabet:- See also :* Alphabets derived from the Latin* Icelandic alphabet* Faroese language* Faroese orthography* Danish and Norwegian alphabet...
      
      , 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
      Hungarian alphabet
      The Hungarian alphabet is an extension of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Hungarian language.One sometimes speaks of the smaller and greater Hungarian alphabets, depending on whether or not the letters Q, W, X, Y are listed, which can only be found in foreign words and traditional...
      
      , the acute accent marks a difference in quality on two vowels, apart from vowel length:

      The (short) vowel a is open back rounded (ɒ)

      Open back rounded vowel

      The open back rounded vowel, or low back rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The symbol is called turned script a, because it is a rotated version of script a, so-called because it...

      
      , 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)

      Close-mid front unrounded vowel

      The close-mid front unrounded vowel, or high-mid front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ....

      
      .

      Despite this difference, these two pairs are arranged as equal in collation

      Collation

      Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order. One common type of collation is called alphabetization, though collation is not limited to ordering letters of the alphabet...

      
      , just like the other pairs (see above) that only differ in length.

    • In Icelandic
      Icelandic alphabet
      The modern Icelandic alphabet consists of the following 32 letters:It is a Latin alphabet with diacritics, in addition it includes the character eth Ðð and the runic letter thorn Þþ...
      
       the acute accent is used on all 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, like in Farœse, 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

      Old Norse

      Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

      
       counterparts, which were long vowels but in many cases have become diphthong

      Diphthong

      A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...

      
      s. The only exception is é, which in Faroese has become æ

      Æ

      Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic...

      
      .

    • In Polish
      Polish alphabet
      The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography . It is based on the Latin alphabet, but includes certain letters with diacritics: the line or kreska, which is graphically similar to an acute accent ; the overdot or kropka ; the tail or...
      
      , the acute on "ó" indicates a pronunciation change into [u], and historically it was used to indicate a long vowel.
    • In Turkmen
      Turkmen alphabet
      The current official Turkmen alphabet as used in Turkmenistan is a Latin alphabet based on the Turkish alphabet, but with notable differences: J is used instead of the Turkish C; Ž is used instead of the Turkish J; Y is used instead of the dotless i ; Ý is used instead of the Turkish consonantal Y;...
      
      , the letter Ý is a consonant: [j].
    
    

    Other uses

    • Many Norwegian
      Norwegian language
      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 .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
      
       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
      Swedish language
      Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
      
      , 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 ("résumé", noun). There are two pairs of homograph
      Homograph
      A homograph is a word or a group of words that share the same written form but have different meanings. When spoken, the meanings may be distinguished by different pronunciations, in which case the words are also heteronyms. Words with the same writing and pronunciation A homograph (from the ,...
      
      s 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
      Northern Sami
      Northern or North Sami is the most widely spoken of all Sami languages. The speaking area of Northern Sami covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland...
      
      , an acute accent was placed over the corresponding Latin
      Latin alphabet
      The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
      
       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.
    • In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform
      Cuneiform script
      Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
      
      , 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
      Basque language
      Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
      
       texts predating Standard Basque
      Batua
      Standard Basque is a standardised version of the Basque language, developed by the Basque Language Academy in the late 1960s, which nowadays is the most widely and commonly spoken Basque-language version throughout the Basque Country...
      
      , the letters r and l carry acute accents (an invention by Sabino Arana
      Sabino Arana
      Sabino Arana Goiri, self-styled as Arana ta Goiri'taŕ Sabin, , was a Spanish and Basque writer. He was the founder of the Basque Nationalist Party and father of Basque nationalism....
      
      ), 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/).
    
    

    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 attaché, blasé, canapé, cliché, communiqué, café, décor, détente, élite, entrée, exposé, mêlée, fiancé, fiancée, papier-mâché, passé, pâté, piqué, plié, repoussé, résumé, risqué, sauté, roué, séance, naïveté, toupée and touché. Retention of the accent is common only in the French
    French language
    French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
    
     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 {{sic|hide=y|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
    Silent E
    Silent e is a writing convention in English spelling. A silent letter e at the end of a word often signals a specific pronunciation of the preceding vowel letter, as in the difference between "rid" and "ride" . This orthographic pattern followed the phonological changes of the Great Vowel Shift...
    
    , for example, maté
    Maté
    Maté may refer to:* Yerba maté - species of holly native to subtropical South America* Mate - infusion, containing stimulants including caffeine, prepared by steeping dried leaves of yerba mate...
    
     from Spanish mate, saké, and the Maldivian capital Malé
    Malé
    Malé , is the capital and most populous city in the Republic of Maldives. It is located at the southern edge of North Malé Atoll . It is also one of the Administrative divisions of the Maldives. Traditionally it was the King's Island, from where the ancient Maldive Royal dynasties ruled and where...
    
    , Pokémon
    Pokémon
    is a media franchise published and owned by the video game company Nintendo and created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1996. Originally released as a pair of interlinkable Game Boy role-playing video games developed by Game Freak, Pokémon has since become the second most successful and lucrative video...
    
     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, italic
    Italic type
    In typography, italic type is a cursive typeface based on a stylized form of calligraphic handwriting. Owing to the influence from calligraphy, such typefaces often slant slightly to the right. Different glyph shapes from roman type are also usually used—another influence from calligraphy...
    
    s are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, coup d'état
    Coup d'état
    A coup d'état state, literally: strike/blow of state)—also known as a coup, putsch, and overthrow—is the sudden, extrajudicial deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to replace the deposed government with another body; either...
    
    , pièce de résistance
    Pièce de résistance
    Pièce de résistance is a French term , translated into English literally as "piece of resistance," referring to the best part or feature of something , a showpiece, or highlight. It can be thought of as the portion of a creation which defies Pièce de résistance is a French term (circa 1839),...
    
    , crème brûlée
    Crème brûlée
    Crème brûlée , also known as burnt cream, crema catalana, or Trinity cream is a dessert consisting of a rich custard base topped with a contrasting layer of hard caramel...
    
     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|date=October 2009}} to indicate the pronunciation [ˈpɪkɪd]. The grave accent
    Grave accent
    The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
    
     is more usually used for this purpose.
    

    Technical notes

    description	character	Unicode	HTML
    acute above	◌́ combining Combining character In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks ....	U+0301	́
    	◌́ combining	U+0341	́
    	◌´ spacing	U+00B4	´ ´
    	◌ˊ spacing	U+02CA	ˊ
    double acute	◌̋ combining	U+030B	̋
    	◌˝ spacing	U+02DD	˝
    acute below	◌̗ combining	U+0317	&#791
    additional diacritic	Latin
    —	Á Á is a letter of the Czech, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Slovak and Sámi languages. This letter also appears in Dutch, Galician, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Lakota, Navajo, and Vietnamese as a variant of the letter “a”. Some writers use á incorrectly to denote a quantity, often used on... á	U+00C1 U+00E1	Á á
    	É É is a letter of the Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Luxembourgish, Slovak, and Catalan, Danish, English, French, Galician, Irish, Italian, Occitan, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese language as a variant of the letter “e”... é	U+00C9 U+00E9	É é
    	Í Í is a letter in the Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Czech, Slovak, and Tatar languages. This letter also appears in Catalan, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Galician, Leonese, Navajo, and Vietnamese language as a variant of letter “i”.... í	U+00CD U+00ED	Í í
    	Ó Ó is a letter in the Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Sorbian languages. This letter also appears in the Catalan, Irish, Occitan, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Vietnamese languages as a variant of letter “o”. It is also used in English for other purposes... ó	U+00D3 U+00F3	Ó ó
    	Ú Ú Ú or ú is a Latin letter used in the Czech, Faroese, Hungarian, Icelandic, and Slovak writing systems. This letter also appears in Dutch, Irish, Occitan, Pinyin, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Vietnamese as a variant of the letter "U".... ú	U+00DA U+00FA	Ú ú
    	Ý Y Y is the twenty-fifth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet and represents either a vowel or a consonant in English.-Name:In Latin, Y was named Y Graeca "Greek Y". This was pronounced as I Graeca "Greek I", since Latin speakers had trouble pronouncing , which was not a native sound... ý	U+00DD U+00FD	Ý ý
    	Ǽ Æ Æ is a grapheme formed from the letters a and e. Originally a ligature representing a Latin diphthong, it has been promoted to the full status of a letter in the alphabets of some languages, including Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Icelandic... ǽ	U+01FC U+01FD	Ǽ ǽ
    	Ǿ Ø Ø — minuscule: "ø", is a vowel and a letter used in the Danish, Faroese, Norwegian and Southern Sami languages.It's mostly used as a representation of mid front rounded vowels, such as ø œ, except for Southern Sami where it's used as an [oe] diphtong.The name of this letter is the same as the sound... ǿ	U+01FE U+01FF	Ǿ ǿ
    	Ć C Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets... ć	U+0106 U+0107	Ć ć
    	Ǵ G G is the seventh letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter 'G' was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of ⟨c⟩ to distinguish voiced, from voiceless, . The recorded originator of ⟨g⟩ is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school,... ǵ	U+01F4 U+01F5	Ǵ ǵ
    	Ḱ K K is the eleventh letter of the English and basic modern Latin alphabet.-History and usage:In English, the letter K usually represents the voiceless velar plosive; this sound is also transcribed by in the International Phonetic Alphabet and X-SAMPA.... ḱ	U+1E30 U+1E31	Ḱ ḱ
    	Ĺ L Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet... ĺ	U+0139 U+013A	Ĺ ĺ
    	Ḿ M M is the thirteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter M is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu . Semitic Mem probably originally pictured water... ḿ	U+1E3E U+1E3F	Ḿ ḿ
    	Ń N N is the fourteenth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History of the forms :One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet... ń	U+0143 U+0144	Ń ń
    	Ṕ ṕ	U+1E54 U+1E55	Ṕ ṕ
    	Ŕ R R is the eighteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The original Semitic letter may have been inspired by an Egyptian hieroglyph for tp, "head". It was used for by Semites because in their language, the word for "head" was rêš . It developed into Greek Ρ and Latin R... ŕ	U+0154 U+0155	Ŕ ŕ
    	Ś S S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent... ś	U+015A U+015B	Ś ś
    	Ẃ W W is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V... ẃ	U+1E82 U+1E83	Ẃ ẃ
    	Ź Z Z is the twenty-sixth and final letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Name and pronunciation:In most dialects of English, the letter's name is zed , reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta but in American English, its name is zee , deriving from a late 17th century English dialectal... ź	U+0179 U+017A	Ź ź
    double acute	Ő ő	U+0150 U+0151	Ő ő
    	Ű ű	U+0170 U+0171	Ű ű
    diaeresis	Ǘ ǘ	U+01D7 U+01D8	Ǘ ǘ
    	Ḯ ḯ	U+1E2E U+1E2F	Ḯ ḯ
    ring	Ǻ Å Å represents various sounds in several languages. Å is part of the alphabets used for the Alemannic and the Bavarian-Austrian dialects of German... ǻ	U+01FA U+01FB	Ǻ ǻ
    cedilla	Ḉ ḉ	U+1E08 U+1E09	Ḉ ḉ
    macron	Ḗ ḗ	U+1E16 U+1E17	Ḗ ḗ
    	Ṓ ṓ	U+1E52 U+1E53	Ṓ ṓ
    tilde	Ṍ ṍ	U+1E4C U+1E4D	Ṍ ṍ
    	Ṹ ṹ	U+1E78 U+1E79	Ṹ ṹ
    dot	Ṥ ṥ	U+1E64 U+1E65	Ṥ ṥ
    circumflex	Ấ Â is a letter of the Friulian, Romanian, Vietnamese, French, Galician, Portuguese, Frisian, Welsh, Turkish, and Walloon alphabets.- Croatian and Serbian :... ấ	U+1EA4 U+1EA5	Ấ ấ
    	Ế Ê is a letter in the Friulan, Kurdish and Vietnamese languages. The letter also appears in Afrikaans, French, Portuguese, Welsh, and Albanian dialects as a variant of the letter "e", as well as being used in certain Chinese and Ukrainian transliteration systems.-Afrikaans:Ê is not considered a... ế	U+1EBE U+1EBF	Ế ế
    	Ố ố	U+1ED0 U+1ED1	Ố ố
    breve	Ắ A A is the first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.- Origins :... ắ	U+1EAE U+1EAF	Ắ ắ
    horn	Ớ O O is the fifteenth letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.The letter was derived from the Semitic `Ayin , which represented a consonant, probably , the sound represented by the Arabic letter ع called `Ayn. This Semitic letter in its original form seems to have been inspired by a... ớ	U+1EDA U+1EDB	Ớ ớ
    	Ứ U U is the twenty-first letter and a vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet.-History:The letter U ultimately comes from the Semitic letter Waw by way of the letter Y. See the letter Y for details.... ứ	U+1EE8 U+1EE9	Ứ ứ
    Greek
    —	Ά Alpha Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet. Alpha or ALPHA may also refer to:-Science:*Alpha , the highest ranking individuals in a community of social animals... ά	U+0386 U+03AC	Ά ά
    	Έ Epsilon Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a close-mid front unrounded vowel . In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 5. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He... έ	U+0388 U+03AD	Έ έ
    	Ή ETA ETA , an acronym for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna is an armed Basque nationalist and separatist organization. The group was founded in 1959 and has since evolved from a group promoting traditional Basque culture to a paramilitary group with the goal of gaining independence for the Greater Basque Country... ή	U+0389 U+03AE	Ή ή
    	Ί Iota Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 10. It was derived from the Phoenician letter Yodh . Letters that arose from this letter include the Roman I and J and the Cyrillic І , Yi , Je , and iotified letters .Iota represents... ί	U+038A U+03AF	Ί ί
    	Ό Omicron Omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 70. It is rarely used in mathematics because it is indistinguishable from the Latin letter O and easily confused with the digit 0... ό	U+038C U+03CC	Ό ό
    	Ύ Upsilon Upsilon is the 20th letter of the Greek alphabet.  In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 400. It is derived from the Phoenician waw. The name of the letter is pronounced in Modern Greek, and in English , , or... ύ	U+038E U+03CD	Ύ ύ
    	Ώ Omega Omega is the 24th and last letter of the Greek alphabet. In the Greek numeric system, it has a value of 800. The word literally means "great O" , as opposed to omicron, which means "little O"... ώ	U+038F U+03CE	Ώ ώ
    diaeresis	— ΐ	— U+0390	— ΐ
    	— ΰ	— U+03B0	— ΰ
    Cyrillic
    —	Ӳ U with double acute (Cyrillic) U with double acute is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, derived from the Cyrillic letter U .U with double acute is used in the alphabet of the Chuvash language, where it represents the close front rounded vowel , the pronunciation of the Latin letter U with umlaut in German... ӳ	U+04F2 U+04F3	Ӳ ӳ

    
    
    The ISO-8859-1 and Windows-1252
    Windows-1252
    Windows-1252 or CP-1252 is a character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows in English and some other Western languages. It is one version within the group of Windows code pages...
    
     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
    Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
    
    .
    

    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|date=May 2009}} The codes (which come from the IBM PC encoding
    Code page 437
    IBM PC or MS-DOS code page 437 is the character set of the original IBM PC. It is also known as CP 437, OEM 437, PC-8, MS-DOS Latin US or sometimes misleadingly referred to as the OEM font, High ASCII or Extended ASCII....
    
    ) 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.{{Citation needed|date=October 2011}}
    

    Microsoft Office

    
    To input an accented letter in a Microsoft Office
    Microsoft Office
    Microsoft Office is a non-free commercial office suite of inter-related desktop applications, servers and services for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, introduced by Microsoft in August 1, 1989. Initially a marketing term for a bundled set of applications, the first version of...
    
     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.
    

    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.
    

    Keyboards

    
    Because keyboard
    Keyboard (computing)
    In computing, a keyboard is a typewriter-style keyboard, which uses an arrangement of buttons or keys, to act as mechanical levers or electronic switches...
    
    s have only a limited number of keys, English keyboards do not have keys for accented characters. The concept of dead key
    Dead key
    A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after...
    
    , 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.
    

    Internet

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

    See also

    • Acute (phonetics)
    • Apex (diacritic)
      Apex (diacritic)
      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.The shape and length of the apex can vary, sometimes within a single inscription...
      
      
    • Circumflex accent
      Circumflex
      The circumflex is a diacritic used in the written forms of many languages, and is also commonly used in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus —a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη...
      
      
    • Double acute accent
      Double acute accent
      The double acute accent is a diacritic mark of the Latin script. It is used primarily in written Hungarian, and consequently is sometimes referred to as Hungarumlaut, a portmanteau of Hungarian umlaut...
      
      
    • Grave accent
      Grave accent
      The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
      
      
    
    
    {{Latin alphabet||acute}}
    

    External links

    
    {{Wiktionary|acute accent}}
    {{Wiktionary|´}}
    {{Wiktionary|á|ć|é|í}}
    {{Wiktionary|ĺ|ḿ|ó}}
    
    • 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
    
    
    {{DEFAULTSORT:Acute Accent}}