SPANISH RULES OF ACCENTUATION Flashcards
In Spanish many words carry a graphic accent, it is to say, a written accent mark. In Spanish we call it tilde. There will be many people who avoid the use of the tilde by all means, and will give you excuses such as “it is old style to use tildes” or “no one cares about tildes anymore”. Well, let´s just say those people don´t know that writing Spanish without tildes is the best way to tell others that you do not know Spanish. No matter what they say, if you do not learn how to use tildes in written Spanish, you cannot say you know the language.
As you can see, we have strong feelings about the use of tildes. Yes, they may seem like tiny nuisances, like pebbles in the shoe that take away the fun of your walk. At StudySpanish.com we like to pictures tildes as the beautiful trees, lakes, and flowers along the walk instead.
TYPES OF SYLLABLES
In order to learn accentuation in Spanish we must learn about the two types of syllables within a word: tónicas and átonas.
Tónicas are those syllables that carry the stress of the word, or the strength when pronouncing it. See the bold syllables, those are tónicas.
MEsa
aZUL
CanTAR
coraZÓN
Átonas are those syllables within the word that do not carry the stress of the word. Let´s highlight now the átonas syllables.
meSA
Azul
CANtar
CORAzón
When placing tildes in Spanish words we must learn about four types of words: agudas, llanas, esdrújulas and sobresdrújulas.
PALABRAS AGUDAS
We call agudas those words in which the last syllable is the tónica. They have the stress on the last syllable.
caracol
verdad
camión
instructor
corazón
pintor
You may ask now why do some agudas have a tilde and some do not? Let´s wait for the accentuation rules below.
PALABRAS LLANAS
We call llanas those words in which the stress falls in the next to the last syllable.
lápiz
toro
come
carta
hábil
You probably observed again that some llanas words above do carry a tilde, and some do not. This is due to the rules of accentuation that we will explain below.
PALABRAS ESDRÚJULAS
These are words that carry the stress or the strength in the third syllable (we always count from the last syllable backwards).
teléfono
esdrújula
tarántula
espátula
cómpralas
Have you noticed they all carry a tilde?
Now that we covered a few concepts we are ready to learn the ACCENTUATION RULES IN SPANISH
PALABRAS AGUDAS
Words that are agudas carry a tilde (accent mark) when they end in -n, -s or a vowel.
comió
canción
café
balón
Tomás
** Words that are agudas and come from other languages like English, that end in – s but this one is preceded by a consonant, do not carry a tilde.
Also, words that are agudas and end in -y do not carry a tilde, as y is a consonant.
PALABRAS LLANAS
Words that are llanas carry a tilde if they do not end in -n, -s or a vowel.
lápiz
cáliz
hábil
Words that are llanas also carry an accent mark or tilde when they end in -s preceded by another consonant.
bíceps
cómics
PALABRAS ESDRÚJULAS
Words that are esdrújulas always carry an accent mark. This makes it easy, doesn´t it?
mecánico
cántico
cántaro
esdrújula
brújula
PALABRAS SOBREESDRÚJULAS
Words that are sobreesdrújulas always carry an accent mark, just as the esdrújulas.
cómetelo
cómpraselas
cántasela
Now that we have learned the accentuation rules in Spanish, we must keep in mind a couple of things.
HIATOS
An hiato happens when we have a syllable that has a combination of a strong vowel (a, e, o) and a weak vowel (i, u). In these cases we always accentuate the weak vowel and they do not follow the accentuation rules that we covered above.
huía
raíz
freír
maría
baúl
ADVERBS ENDING IN –MENTE
Adverbs ending in -mente will carry an accent mark if the original adjective carried one.
rápido – rápidamente
hábil – hábilmente
útil – útilmente
Now that you are here, remember, you do not have an excuse to avoid the accentuation marks or tildes in Spanish. Utilícelas!
