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Accents and Special Characters

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Read Spanish for any length of time and you'll notice that many words include accent marks. These are not different or unique letters but rather visual cues letting us know how to pronounce a word (and they're sometimes used to distinguish one word from another spelled the same way).

Before you start complaining that accent marks make Spanish needlessly complicated, remember that the vast majority of the time, you know exactly how to pronounce a word just by looking at it. The same cannot be said of English which doesn't give the reader any clues about pronunciation (consider the words "content," "defense," "or "duplicate" -- they are pronouced in different ways based on the context). English speakers learn how to pronounce words through practice and repetition.

The rules regarding accent marks are fairly simple: First of all, only a vowel can be accented: á, é, í, ó, ú (y is not considered a vowel for the purposes of accents.) If you find yourself writing an accent over an "n" or a "b" something's very, very wrong.

Secondly, a word does not necessarily need an accent mark, and a word may never have more than one accent.

When to Use Accents

So why do some words have accents? And how do I know when to write one?

Accent marks have to do with stress, that is, which syllable in the word is emphasized. Consider this English word:

elephant

The first of the three syllables (the "el") is stressed. Try pronouncing "elephant" stressing a different syllable. Sounds pretty weird, doesn't it?

If there isn't a written accent mark, every Spanish word that ends in a vowel, or an "-n," or an "-s" has the stress fall on the second-to-last syllable (the "penultimate" syllable):

manzana
hablan
problemas

Every other word (words ending in a consonant other than "-n" or "-s") has the stress fall on the last syllable (the "ultimate" syllable):

felicidad
hablar
sensacional

But rules are made to be broken, so when we want to stress a syllable other than the one we should be stressing, we use an accent mark:

inglés
habló
árbol

The word inglés ends in an "s" so normally we'd emphasize the second-to-last syllable (the "in") but the accent mark tells us to stress the ("glés") instead. Habló ends in a vowel but an accent mark tells us to stress the last syllable rather than the second-to-last. Árbol ends in an "l" so we'd normally be emphasizing the last syllable, but the accent mark tells us to stress the first syllable instead.

If the stress falls on anything other than the penultimate or ultimate syllables there must be an accent mark used.

More on Accents

Object pronouns can also cause situations which force us to add accent marks. The three situations where we can add a pronoun to the end of a verb are: infinitives, present participles, and affirmative commands. In each case we're adding an extra syllable (or two) to the end of a word. This would likely alter the pronunciation if we don't add an accent mark to where the stress originally fell:

Accent marks also become particularly important when dealing with verb conjugations. Certain present tense conjugations would be identical to their preterite conjugations if it weren't for the accent marks. Consider:

Some imperfect subjunctive and the future tense conjugations could also be confused without accent marks:

Even More on Accents

There are a number of homonyms (words that sound the same but have different meanings) in Spanish that also use the same spelling. Even though there isn't any other reason to do so, accent marks are used to differentiate the two words.

• "de" (meaning "of") compared to "dé" (a subjunctive conjugation of "dar")
• "el" (meaning "the") compared to "él" (meaning "he")
• "que" (meaning "that") compared to "qué" (meaning "what")
• "se" (the reflexive pronoun) compared to "sé" (meaning "I know")
• "si" (meaning "if") compared to "sí" (meaning "yes")
• "te" (the reflexive pronoun "you") compared to "té" (meaning "tea")
• "tu" (meaning "your") compared to "tú" (meaning "you")

You may have also noticed that interrogatory words all have accent marks which don't change the pronunciation but help keep them separate from the adverbs that are used to answer the questions:

—¿Dónde lo enconstraste?
—Lo encontré donde se vende gasolina.

Accent marks are also occasionally used to break-up syllables in words which would otherwise be shorter. These words contain something called a "diphthong."

What on earth is a "diphthong?" It's a combination of two vowels that blend together when spoken to create one new sound. The following words all have diphthongs:

hablais
bien
cuaderno

Hablais is pronounced like "ob-lice" because the "a" and the "i" blend together. Bien is a one syllable word pronounced like "byen." And the first syllable of cuaderno is pronounced like "quad" rather than "coo-ad" because the "u" and the "a" blend together.

Sometimes we don't want letters to blend together so we break-up the diphthong with an accent mark:

país
reír

País is a two-syllable word thanks to the accent mark. Reír (and other "-eir" verbs) needs an accent on the "-ir" ending so it's pronounced like "ray-ear" and not "rare."

Notes

• The accent mark is more accurately known as an "acute accent" or "diacritical mark." In Spanish it should be drawn from the lower left to the upper right above the letter.
• When writing "or" between numbers an accent is used so that the "o" is not confused with the number "0" e.g. "Necesito 2 ó 3 bolígrafos."
• Oftentimes in Spanish, capital letters which should be accented are not. This might motivate you to write everything in capital letters and forget the accent marks, but it's still not grammatically correct.
• There are exceptions to the Spanish accent rules. Words that have migrated to Spanish from English often keep the English (non-accented) spellings. For example, Internet and sandwich should have accent marks (Ínternet and sándwich) but they don't.

Other Characters

Other than the accent marks there are four other characters that are not found in the English language: ñ, ü, ¡ and ¿

The ñ should be considered a unique character and not a modification of the "n." It should also not be considered an accented letter. (See Alphabet)

Occasionally we need to use a dieresis (two dots) on top of the "u" to change its pronunciation when it follows the letter "g." Normally the "u" is silent, but when a dieresis is used it tells us to pronounce the "gu" combination like "gw." Some examples: pingüino (penguin); vergüenza (shame); and nicaragüense (Nicaraguan).

The upside-down exclamation and question marks simply precede any sentence that ends with one. It can be helpful when reading to know at the beginning of the sentence whether it's a question or an exclamation.

¡Que buena idea!
Rodrigo, ¿dónde estás?