Accents

In Spanish, rules around accents will communicate to you how to pronounce a word, even if you don't know it. Every word falls into one of these four categories: agudas, llanas, esdrújulas, and sobreesdrújulas. What these words describe is where to put the emphasis when speaking the word. Here are some examples in English, with bold annotating where to speak with emphasis: passenger, communicate, pronounce.

• agudas: The emphasis is in the last syllable
• llanas: The emphasis is in the second to last syllable
• esdrújulas: The emphasis is in the third to last syllable
• sobreesdrújulas: The emphasis is in any syllable further back than any of the others

Now, we can talk about how these categories decide where to put an accent. The accent over a vowel communicates to us where to speak a word with emphasis, but by knowing how to accent a word, the lack thereof will also communicate that. Here are the rules for accenting, by category:

• agudas: The word ends in a vowel, n, or s
• llanas: The word does not end in a vowel, n, or s
• esdrújulas: The word is always accented
• sobreesdrújulas: The word is always accented

Here are some examples of words that are agudas:

• algodón
• llevó
• olvidé
• jamás
• saltar

Here are some examples of words that are llanas:

• llaves
• fácil
• puerta
• pagan
• alegría

Here are some examples of words that are esdrújulas:

• murciélago
• bravísimo
• magnífico
• huérfano
• químico

Exceptions

While these are clear for multi-syllable words, it gets a little more complicated for monosyllable words. These are typically not accented, except for the purpose of differentiation. "mas" and "más" are two different words, so in order to clarify which one we're referring to, we use accents.

The other exception is with certain suffixes that are used to turn words into adverbs. The suffix "-mente" is one such suffix (which works the same as the English suffix "-ly". In this case, we use the root word's accenting rules in order to determine where to put the accent. So for example, in the word "suavemente", despite the fact that the emphasis is still in the first syllable, we follow the rules for llanas and not sobreesdrújulas, since the root word is "suave".

Exercises

Go to a random Wikipedia article and see, based on these accent rules, if you can read the page.

For the following words, place the missing accent, if one is missing (don't worry about getting it wrong, writing accents is more about familiarity with the words):

• cocine
• cai
• pentagono
• algo
• hermanos
• pajaro
• jabon