Spanish Accent Marks

Spanish Accents

If you have been following the course as I laid it out, we have learned about consonants, vowels, and diphthongs thus far. You have some of the basics under your belt. Knowing a bunch of letters is not going to get you speaking Spanish though. You need to know how words are pronounced. Better yet, you need to know which part of the words are stressed. You will learn what Spanish accent marks mean here and how to go about pronouncing them. There are three major rules when it comes to the stress of words in Spanish.

• If the word does not end in a vowel or if the word does not have the stress on the last syllable then you would place an accent over the vowel which the stress is assigned to.


• If the given word ends in a vowel or the letters "N" or "S", you put the stress on the next to last syllable. A lot of words fall into this spot.


• Our last group, includes words that end in other letters. If this is the case, you place the stress of the word on the very last syllable.

Foreign places and your own name normally do not have any accent marks. Sometimes accents may or may not be used in public places, as well as to distinguish between words of similar nature. There are orthographic accents which do not affect the pronunciation at all. Also, on a side note, some words can have different meanings but sound very similar. Somtimes accent marks are used to differentiate these as well. Alphabet Pronunciation>>