The acute accent () is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.
Uses
History An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.
The acute accent was first used in French in 1530 by Geoffroy Tory, the royal printer.
Pitch
Ancient Greek
The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is (oxeîa, Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan-translated) into Latin as "sharpened".
Stress The acute accent marks the stressed vowel of a word in several languages: Asturian Belarusian As follows: , , , , , , , , . Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word, for example, ('leaves'). 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 ( – , meaning 'occur' and 'prevent' respectively) or a more closed vowel ( – , equivalent to English 'hey' and 'heh') if it is not clear from context. Sometimes, it is simply used for disambiguation, as in – , meaning 'one' and 'a(n)'. Galician 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, 'peach' ("open" or "wide" vowel, as in English pen) and 'fishing' ("closed" or "narrow" vowel, as in pain). However, in some regional accents, these words can be pronouned the same way, or even with opposite values. Lakota. For example, 'in that direction' but 'take something to someone back there'. Leonese uses it for marking stress or disambiguation. Modern Greek marks the stressed vowel of every polysyllabic word: (á), (é), (í), (í), (ó), (í), (ó). 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: (first syllable stressed) means 'the arm' while means 'the army'; (first syllable stressed) means 'bear's den' in Swedish, while means 'idea'. Also stress-related are the different spellings of the words / and / (the indefinite article and the word 'one' in Danish and Norwegian). In Norwegian, however, the neuter word 'one' is spelled . Then, the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object, which derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loanwords, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, such as Norwegian and Swedish and Danish (also ). Occitan Portuguese: á, é, í, ó, ú. It may also indicate height (see below). Russian. Syllabic stress is irregular in Russian, and in reference and teaching materials (dictionaries and books for children or foreigners), stress is indicated by an acute accent above the stressed vowel, e.g. (, dog), 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.: ('the') and ('he'). 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, ('cow') and ('maybe'). Ukrainian: sometimes added to mark syllabic stress, when it can help to distinguish between homographs: vs. , as follows: , , , , (acute instead of dot), (acute above two dots), , , , . 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 (short) vowel is by the use of the acute accent. In Welsh orthography, this can be on any vowel: á, é, í, ó, ú, ẃ, or ý. Examples: 'to hate', 'cigarette', 'umbrella'.
Height
The acute accent marks the height of some stressed vowels in various Romance languages. To mark high vowels: Bislama (an English-based creole, not Romance). 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 (as opposed to è ), and ó (as opposed to ò ). 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 (sometimes called accento chiuso, "closed accent" in Italian) is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel (and a few other words). Words ending in stressed -o or -a are never marked with an acute accent (ó or á), but with a grave accent (ò or à). Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in , such as ('why/because'); in the conjugated copula ('is'); in ambiguous monosyllables such as ('neither') vs. ('of it') and ('itself') vs. ('if'); and some verb forms, for example: ('he/she/it could' (past tense)). The symbol ó can be used in the body of a word for disambiguation, for instance between ('barrel') and ('beating'), 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 (as opposed to è ), ó (as opposed to ò ) and á (as opposed to à ). Scottish Gaelic (a Celtic rather than Romance language) 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 , and in order to distinguish them from , and respectively.http://www.his.com/~rory/orthocrit.html The other vowels (i and u) only appear either without an accent or with a grave. Since the 1980s the SQA (which sets school standards and thus the de facto standard language) and most publishers have abandoned the acute accent, using grave accents in all situations (analogous to the use of the acute in Irish). 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 . 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 . (see double acute accent) are the long equivalents of . Both types of accents are known as ( means long). The letters and are the long equivalents of and respectively, but they are also distinct in quality: [aː] and [eː] rather than *[ɒː] and *[ɛ:] (see below in Letter extension). Irish: are the long equivalents of the vowels , the accent affects pronunciation and meaning, e.g. ('John') but ('old'). The accent is known as a ('long (sign)'), 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 (also written ) 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 in Slovak. In addition to the long vowels , 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 A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized sound in several languages.
In Polish, such a mark is known as a ("stroke") and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization, similar to the use of the in Czech and other Slavic languages (e.g. "six"). However, in contrast to the which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the denotes alveolo-palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center. A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet . However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance.
In Serbo-Croatian, as in Polish, the letter is used to represent a voiceless alveolo-palatal affricate .
In the romanization of Macedonian, and represent the Cyrillic letters (Gje) and (Kje), which stand for palatal or alveolo-palatal consonants, though and (or and ) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated Proto-Indo-European phonemes and .
uses the acute for palatalization as in Polish: . Lower also uses , and Lower previously used and , also written as ; these are now spelt as and .
Tone In the system for Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for Cantonese, the Pinyin romanization for Mandarin Chinese, and the Bopomofo semi-syllabary, the acute accent indicates a rising tone. In Mandarin, the alternative to the acute accent is the number 2 after the syllable: = . In Cantonese Yale, the acute accent is either tone 2, or tone 5 if the vowel(s) are followed by 'h' (if the number form is used, 'h' is omitted): = , = .
In African languages and Athabaskan languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e.g., Yoruba 'arm', Nobiin 'sweet date', Koti 'boat', Navajo 'just'. Also the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi can use the acute accent to mark a higher tone.
The acute accent is used in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.
Disambiguation The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages:
Catalan. Examples: 'they are' vs. 'tiredness', 'more' vs. 'month'.