Spanish/Print version - Wikibooks, open books for an open world

Acute accents

Spanish uses the ´ (Acute) diacritic mark over vowels to indicate a vocal stress on a word that would normally be stressed on another syllable; Stress is contrastive. For example, the word ánimo is normally stressed on a, meaning "mood, spirit." While animo is stressed on ni meaning "I cheer." And animó is stressed on mó meaning "he cheered."

Additionally the acute mark is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs. It's used in various question word or relative pronoun pairs such as cómo (how?)& como (as), dónde(where?) & donde (where), and some other words such as tú (you) & tu (your), él (he/him) & el (the).