The Ultimate Guide to Accents in Spanish

Because we do not use them in English spelling, using accents (or as we call them in Spanish- acentos or tildes depending on where you're from) can seem quite daunting at first. The following is a guide on how to use them. Because spelling in Spanish highly regular, you can expect these rules to be pretty much exceptionless. First thing to note is that in Spanish (unlike in French or Portuguese), we only use one sort of accent. Accents in Spanish tell us which syllable to stress when we say a word, they can also serve as a way to break one syllable into two. Knowing how to use accents in Spanish is also important because it helps improve pronunciation and informs us on how to pronounce words we may not have heard before. 

First thing's first. In Spanish, vowels can be divided in to strong sounding vowels and weak sounding vowels. 

Strong: A, O, E

Weak: I, U

We call A, O, and E strong vowels because any time that any two of these vowels appear next to each other in a word, both these vowels will have to be pronounced in such a way that a syllable break occurs between these vowels. Consider the proper name Mateo. Because the vowels E and O are pronounced strongly, the syllables in the name Mateo are broken down as follows: Ma-te-o. Now consider what happens when we combine a so-called weak vowel and a strong vowel.

When a strong vowel and a weak vowel are combined, there is no break in the syllable. Consider the Spanish word for ice, hielo- whose syllables are broken down as hie-lo. This is because the 'i' is pronounced softly so as to produce a combined vowel sound with the stronger vowel 'e'. The first use for accents in Spanish is to create exceptions to this rule. There are some words where the weak vowel is pronounced as strongly as the strong vowel, so as to break the syllable into two. In these cases, we add an accent to to the weaker vowel to as to break the combined vowel sound and create two separate strong vowel sounds. Consider the proper name María. The accent creates the vowel break Ma-rí-a. The accent also forces us to stress the syllable containing the the i in the word. More on this in a second.

The second use of accents in Spanish is to tell us which syllable to stress in a word. Because most words in Spanish end in the letters N, S, or a vowel, an unnaccented word in Spanish will usually stress the penultimate syllable. Take for instance the Spanish word for cream, crema. Because there is no accent, we stress the penultimate syllable, so we pronounce it CRE-ma.

Unnaccented words which do not end in N, S, or a vowel stress the last syllable in a word. Consider the Spanish word for rice, arroz. Here, the last syllable is stressed: ar-ROZ. Accents are used to mark exceptions in pronunciation to these two rules. So:

Words where the last syllable is stressed, but end in N, S, or a vowel require an accent in the last syllable in order to mark that this syllable must be stressed in order to pronounce the word properly. Consider the Spanish word for platform, andén. Here, the last syllable in the word is stressed, so an-DÉN. 

Words where the penultimate syllable is stressed, but DO NOT end in N, S, or a vowel also require an accent so as to show that the penultimate syllable is to be stressed in order to pronounce it properly. Consider the Spanish surname González. Pronounced Gon-ZÁ-lez. 

Finally, some words in Spanish require us to stress the antepenultimate syllable, or the syllable that comes before the penultimate. These words are extremely rare in Spanish, and as such ALWAYS require an accent. Consider the Spanish word for compass, brújula. Pronounced BRÚ-ju-la.