Acute accent

Uses

History

Pitch

Ancient Greek

Stress

• Asturian
• Belarusian As follows:,,,,,,,,.
• Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word, for example, soyópokistsi.
• Bulgarian: stress, which is variable in Bulgarian, is not usually indicated in Bulgarian except in dictionaries and sometimes in homonyms that are distinguished only by stress. However, Bulgarian usually uses the grave accent to mark the vowel in a stressed syllable, unlike Russian and Ukrainian, which use the acute accent.
• Catalan uses it in stressed vowels: é, í, ó, ú.
• Dutch uses it to mark stress or a more closed vowel if it is not clear from context. Sometimes, it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a".
• Galician
• Hopi has acute to mark a higher tone.
• Italian The accent is used to indicate the stress in a word, or whether the vowel is "open" or "wide", or "closed", or "narrow". For example, pèsca "peach" and pésca "fishing". However, in some regional accents, these words can be pronouned the same way, or even with opposite values.
• Lakota. For example, kákhi "in that direction" but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
• Leonese uses it for marking stress or disambiguation.
• Modern Greek marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic word: , , , , , , .
• Navajo where the acute marks a higher tone.
• Norwegian, Swedish and Danish use the acute accent to indicate that a terminal syllable with the e is stressed and is often omitted if it does not change the meaning: armen means "the arm" while armén means "the army"; ide means "bear's den" in Swedish, while idé means "idea". Also stress-related are the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét. In Norwegian, however, the neuter word "one" is spelled ett. Then, the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object, which derives from the obsolete spelling een and eet. Some loanwords, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, such as Norwegian and Swedish kafé and Danish café.
• Occitan
• Portuguese: á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height.
• Russian. Syllabic stress is irregular in Russian, and in reference and teaching materials, stress is indicated by an acute accent above the stressed vowel, e.g. соба́ка, as follows:,,,,,,,,. The acute accent can be used both in the Cyrillic and sometimes in the romanised text.
• Spanish marks stressed syllables in polysyllabic words that deviate from the standardized stress patterns. In monosyllabic words, it is used to distinguish homophones, e.g.: el and él.
• Tagalog dictionaries including other Philippine languages use the acute accent to mark a vowel in a syllable with lexical stress and avoid ambiguity. Combinations include á, í, ó, and ú while é is the rarest one. Since they are not part of the official alphabet, these vowels do not affect the order of each letter. Vowels with a stress at the first syllable are left unwritten and serves as the default word. For example, baka and baká.
• Ukrainian: sometimes added to mark syllabic stress, when it can help to distinguish between homographs: за́мок vs. замо́к, as follows:,,,,,,,,. Commonly used in dictionaries, readers, and some children's books.
• Welsh: word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final vowel is by the use of the acute accent. In the Welsh orthography, it can be on any vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú, ẃ, or ý. Examples: casáu "to hate", sigarét "cigarette", ymbarél "umbrella".

  Height

• To mark high vowels:
• *Bislama. One of the two orthographies distinguishes é from e. The orthography after 1995 does not distinguish these sounds, and has no diacritics.
• *Catalan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é , and ó .
• *French. The acute is used on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes é from è, ê, and e. Unlike in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
• *Italian. The acute accent is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel. Words ending in stressed -o are never marked with an acute accent, but with a grave accent. Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché ; in the conjugated copula è ; in ambiguous monosyllables such as né ''vs. ne and sé vs. se ; and some verb forms, e.g. poté. The symbol ó'' can be used in the body of a word for disambiguation, for instance between bótte and bòtte, though this is not mandatory: in fact standard Italian keyboards lack a dedicated ó key.
• *Occitan. The acute marks the quality of the vowels é , ó and á .
• *Scottish Gaelic uses/used a system in which é is contrasted with è and ó with ò. Both the grave and acute indicate length; é/''è and ó''/ò are thus contrasted with e and o respectively. Besides, á appears in the words á, ám and ás in order to distinguish them from a, am and as respectively. The other vowels only appear either without an accent or with a grave. Since the 1980s the SQA and most publishers have abandoned the acute accent, using grave accents in all situations. However, universities, some publishers and many speakers continue to use acute accents.
• To mark low vowels:
• *Portuguese. The vowels á, é and ó are stressed low vowels, in opposition to â, ê and ô which are stressed high vowels. However, the accent is only used in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word: where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, no accent is used, and the height of the stressed vowel cannot then usually be determined solely from the word's spelling.

  Length

Long vowels

• Arabic and Persian: were used in western transliteration of Islamic language texts from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Representing the long vowels, they are typically transcribed with a macron today except in Bahá'í orthography.
• Classical Latin: sometimes used to represent the apex in modern orthography.
• Czech: are the long versions of. The accent is known as čárka. To indicate a long in the middle or at the end of a word, a ring is used instead, to form.
• Hungarian: are the long equivalents of the vowels. are the long equivalents of. Both types of accents are known as hosszú ékezet. The letters and are the long equivalents of and respectively, but they are also distinct in quality: and rather than * and *.
• Irish: are the long equivalents of the vowels, the accent affects pronunciation and meaning, e.g. Seán but sean. The accent is known as a fada , which is also used in Hiberno-English.
• Old Norse: are the long versions of. Sometimes, is used as the long version of, but is used more often. Sometimes, the short-lived Old Icelandic long is written using an acute-accented form,, or a version with a macron,, but usually it is not distinguished from from which it is derived by u-mutation.
• Slovak: the acute accent is called dĺžeň in Slovak. In addition to the long vowels, dĺžeň is used to mark syllabic consonants, which are the long counterparts of syllabic.

  Short vowels

• Ligurian: in the official orthography, é is used for short, and ó is used for short.

  Palatalization