If you’re a native English speaker who is learning Spanish, you may be confused by the accent marks, or the lines above certain letters in words like día, pequeño, or vergüenza. This is because other than a few, relatively rare, borrowed words from French, like naïveté, English doesn’t have accented letters. Even if you’re an intermediate or advanced learner, you may be surprised to learn that there are actually rules about where the accent marks go and what they do. So let’s dive in.
The Rising Accent Mark
The rising accent mark, like the accent mark in the word día, is called an acute accent. Simply put, the acute accent mark is used to denote which syllable has the emphasis in a word. To understand this, we need to understand how syllables are formed in Spanish.
Strong Vowels and Weak Vowels in Spanish
Spanish has the same vowels that English does: a, e, i, o, u. For the purposes of this article, we won’t consider the letter y to be a vowel, although it follows the same rule as it does in English, which is that it can sometimes be a vowel.
Vowels can be split into two categories: strong and weak.
Strong vowels are vowels that always form a new syllable when they appear in a word, even when they appear right next to each other. In Spanish, these vowels are a, e, and o. Since strong vowels always form a new syllable, the word traer is a two-syllable word, for example.
Weak vowels only form their own syllables when they are surrounded by consonants. If they are next to another vowel, they combine into a single syllable, known as a diphthong. This is what differentiates weak vowels from strong vowels. Strong vowels are pronounced more prominently when combined, whereas weak vowels are not. In Spanish, these vowels are i and u.
You can see the difference between the words espíritu, which has four syllables, three of which are formed by weak vowels on their own, and luego, which only has two syllables since u and e combine into a single diphthong.
Emphasis in Spanish
Every word in Spanish has one and only one stressed syllable. While there are exceptions, in general, the rule is that if a word ends in a vowel or the letters n or s, then the second to last syllable is stressed. Examples of this include “se-ma-na” and “a-po-yan”, which both have their emphasis on their second to last syllables. Otherwise, if a word ends in a consonant that isn’t an n or s, then the stress is on the last syllable. For example, “re-loj” has its emphasis on the last syllable.
The acute accent mark is used to denote where words break these rules. For example, fantástico has its emphasis on the third to last syllable, when it should have the emphasis on the second to last syllable.
The Acute Accent Marks in Diphthongs
The acute accent mark is also used to break up diphthongs and turn weak vowels into their own syllable. For instance, the word día from our example should be a one-syllable word since “ia” should form a diphthong. However, día is pronounced with two syllables and so the i gets an acute accent to denote that it is pronounced separately.
Because diphthongs form syllables, they can have accent marks if the emphasis is on them. This happens a lot when conjugating verbs. If a diphthong is formed by combining two weak vowels, then the accent mark always falls on the second letter, such as in cuídate. If the diphthong has a strong vowel in it, then the accent mark always falls on the strong vowel, such as in después and también. Remember that diphthongs never contain multiple strong vowels.
Distinguishing Between Homophones
Occasionally, the acute accent mark is used to distinguish between homophones, or words that sound the same, when writing. Consider the words, mi and mí or tu and tú. These words are pronounced exactly the same since there are no other vowels that have the stress.
Interestingly, this is also true of the words que and qué. Unlike día, which uses an acute accent on the weak vowel to break up a diphthong, qué has an accent on the strong vowel of its diphthong, meaning that the emphasis remains the same.
How to Type the Acute Accent Mark
On mobile phones and tablets powered by Android or iOS, you can press and hold the letter to which you want to add an acute accent mark.
On Mac computers, you can type an acute accent mark by pressing Option + e and then the letter to which you want to add an acute accent mark.
On Windows computers, you can type Ctrl + apostrophe (’) and then the letter to which you want to add an acute accent mark.
The Double Dots
You probably mostly associate two dots above a letter with the German umlaut. If you want to appear really cool at parties, you should know that the German umlaut (which also appears in Hungarian) is actually different than the two dots in Spanish words like vergüenza. The Spanish version of the umlaut is called a diaeresis. The umlaut in German is used to denote that a vowel has a different sound than it should whereas the diaeresis is used similarly to the acute accent in a diphthong.
Consider the Spanish words guerra and vergüenza. When you say the word guerra, you should say the “gue” similar to the English word gay or the first syllable in the name Gareth. However, the “güe” is pronounced like “gwa”. The diaeresis is responsible for the “gwa” sound in Spanish since it denotes that the u is pronounced separately from the e, whereas the “ue” is a diphthong in the word guerra.
Because the diphthongs “ua” and “uo” always have the w sound, such as guapo or antiguo, you’ll only ever see a diaeresis on the letter u that is between the letter g and the letters e or i.
How to Type the Diaeresis
On mobile phones and tablets powered by Android or iOS, you can press and hold the letter to which you want to add a diaeresis.
On Mac computers, you can type a diaeresis by pressing Option + u and then the letter to which you want to add a diaeresis.
On Windows computers, you can type Ctrl + Shift + colon (:) and then the letter to which you want to add a diaeresis.
The Tilde
The tilde is the squiggly line that appears above the letter n in ñ in words like pequeño. The tilde is actually not an accent mark since ñ is considered to be a totally different letter.
Ñ is pronounced similarly to the letter n but has a more nasal inflection. It’s very similar to the last syllable of the English word crayon. Other romance languages have the same sound, but they’re usually denoted with two letters, such as “gn” in French and Italian and “nh” in Portuguese. In Old Spanish, this sound was originally denoted with a double n, such as Espanna. The tilde originates from a shorthand used by medieval monks that would use a similar superscript (a line above a letter) to denote that there were missing letters, so the ñ likely came from a shorthand of the double n. While the tilde exists in other romance languages, especially Portuguese, the ñ only exists in Spanish and languages heavily influenced by Spanish, such as Galician.
Because it’s a totally different letter, there are no grammar rules for when to use it like the diaeresis and the acute accent mark.
How to Type the Tilde
On mobile phones and tablets powered by Android or iOS, you can press and hold the letter to which you want to add a tilde. This is only n for Spanish, but since the tilde exists in other languages, you will find it over the a and o as well.
On Mac computers, you can type a tilde by pressing Option + n and then the letter to which you want to add a tilde.
On Windows computers, you can type Ctrl + Shift + tilde (~), which is located in the top left of most keyboards, and then the letter to which you want to add an acute accent mark.