Acute accent

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Diacritic mark used in written languages

The acute accent (´) is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with Latin script, Cyrillic script, and Greek script. It is employed to indicate a variety of phonetic values, including stress, vowel height, vowel length, and tone.

Usage in Different Languages

Latin Script

In languages that use the Latin alphabet, the acute accent is often used to denote stress or to distinguish between words that would otherwise be homographs.

• In Spanish, the acute accent is used to indicate the stressed syllable in words where the stress does not follow the default rules. For example, café (coffee) and tú (you).
• In French, it is used on the letter e to indicate a change in pronunciation, as in école (school).
• In Portuguese, it marks stressed vowels in words where the stress is not on the penultimate syllable, such as avó (grandmother).

Greek Script

In Greek, the acute accent (known as τόνος) indicates the stressed syllable in a word. For example, καφές (coffee).

Cyrillic Script

In some languages that use the Cyrillic alphabet, such as Russian, the acute accent is used to denote stress, particularly in dictionaries and language learning materials. For example, замок (castle) vs. замок (lock).

Computing

In Unicode, the acute accent is encoded at U+00B4. It can be combined with various letters to form accented characters, such as é (U+00E9) and á (U+00E1).

See Also

• Grave accent
• Circumflex
• Diacritic
• Stress (linguistics)
• Tone (linguistics)

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