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The acute accent (´) is a diacritic mark used in written French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Greek, Welsh, Hungarian, Faroese, Icelandic, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Czech, Slovak, VietnameseVietnamese (ting Vit, ting Vit-nam, or Vit-ngữ), a tonal language, is the national and official language of Vietnam (Vit-nam). It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Vit or người kinh), who constitute ab, DutchDutch is a West Germanic language spoken worldwide by around 21 million people. The variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium is also informally called Flemish . The Dutch name for the language is Nederlands or less formal Hollands and Dutch is sometimes called, Irish Gaelic and other languages.1 Openess
In French and Italian, the acute accent is used only on the letter e, where it changes the vowel sound.
In French, it changes é [e], and e [@]. In Italian, it makes an é be pronounced as [e], in a position it would normally be pronounced as [E]; it also marks the stressed vowel (mostly the last one), where the stress would normally be on another syllable (just as in Spanish).
2 Stress or disambiguation
In Spanish, PortugueseThe word Portuguese can mean: From or related to Portugal The ethnic Portuguese people, see list of Portuguese people The Portuguese language Portuguese Creole Portuguese sidewalk Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was nicknamed "My little Portuguese" by her, CatalanCatalan can mean: the Catalan language Eugene Charles Catalan the mathematician inhabitant of Catalonia There is also information on Catalan names., and GreekThe word Greek has a number of meanings relating to Greece, including: Architecture of Ancient Greece Art in Ancient Greece Greek alphabet Greek colonies Cuisine of Greece Ethnic Greek Greco-Turkish relations Greece Hellenes History of Greece History of M, the acute accent is used to mark the stressed vowel of a written word that would normally be stressed on another syllable. Stress is contrastive in those languages. E.g., in Spanish ánimo ["a-ni-mo] ("mood, spirit"), animo [a-"ni-mo] ("I cheer"), and animó [a-ni-"mo] ("he cheered") are three different words. In Welsh words the stress is always given on the penultimate syllable unless indicated otherwise by the use of an acute accent on the stressed vowel.
In Spanish and Dutch, the acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. In Spanish, various question word / relative pronoun pairs, such as cómo & como (how), dónde & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the); in Dutch, mainly één (one) & een (a/an), and vóór (before) & voor (for).
In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence.
3 Openess or disambiguation
In Swedish, the acute accent is also used only on the letter e, mostly in words of French origin and in some names, and mostly on the last syllable of a word. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel sound, same as in French, and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include resumé (accent on the last e only!) and Linné (the title taken by Carolus Linnaeus when he was knighted).
It is otherwise used in rare cases to show the accent of foreign and transcribed words (such as advéniat, svobóda).
