THE TRUTH ABOUT ACCENT MARKS IN SPANISH
My Spanish teachers liked to show off their advanced knowledge of linguistics with long impressive words like esdrújula, sobreesdrújula, and penultimate. So, I gave up on comprehending those little marks and just did my best to learn words visually, accent mark and all. When in doubt I sprinkled marks randomly like salt and pepper to give my writing that Spanish-ey flavor.
There are many fascinating things that linguists know about language in general and accent marks in particular, but I will not go into that here because if your goal is to speak and understand Spanish in the real world, you can take courage from knowing that most Spanish-speaking four-year-olds and a few two-and-three-year-olds have already mastered more than you will ever need to know in order to reach your goal, and those pre-schoolers have not yet even heard the word esdrújula. If you forego the big impressive words, the facts are really very simple:
An accent mark on a syllable indicates that the marked syllable is to be stressed in the word. So canción will be pronounced something like this: kahn–SYON. Well, then, what about all those words that don’t have an accent mark? We can divide those words into two major groups:
- Words that end in a vowel (a,e,i,o,u) or the consonants n or s. These words will be stressed on the next-to-last syllable. (Ricardo)
- Words that end in any letter other than the ones in the first group. These words will be stressed on the last syllable. (arroz)
Accent marks have a few other uses, such as distinguishing between one-syllable words that are spelled alike but have different meanings, like sí (yes) and si (if).
They also indicate whether two vowels together make a diphthong (no mark) or should be pronounced individually (María).
Now you know.