Blackfoot uses acute accents to show the place of stress in a word, for example, soyópokistsi (Template:Translation).
Bulgarian: stress, which is variable in Bulgarian, is not usually indicated in Bulgarian except in dictionaries and sometimes in homonyms that are distinguished only by stress. However, Bulgarian usually uses the grave accent to mark the vowel in a stressed syllable, unlike Russian and Ukrainian, which use the acute accent.
Dutch uses it to mark stress (vóórkomen – voorkómen, meaning occur and prevent respectively) or a more closed vowel (hé – hè, equivalent to English hey and heh) if it is not clear from context. Sometimes, it is simply used for disambiguation, as in één – een, meaning "one" and "a(n)".
Italian The accent is used to indicate the stress in a word, or whether the vowel is "open" or "wide", or "closed", or "narrow". For example, pèscaTemplate:IPA "peach" ("open" or "wide" vowel, as in "pen") and péscaTemplate:IPA "fishing" ("closed" or "narrow" vowel, as in "pain"). However, in some regional accents, these words can be pronouned the same way, or even with opposite values.
Lakota. For example, kákhi "in that direction" but kakhí "take something to someone back there".
Leonese uses it for marking stress or disambiguation.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish use the acute accent to indicate that a terminal syllable with the e is stressed and is often omitted if it does not change the meaning: armen (first syllable stressed) means "the arm" while armé(e)n means "the army"; ide (first syllable stressed) means "bear's den" in Swedish,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> while idé means "idea". Also stress-related are the different spellings of the words en/én and et/ét (the indefinite article and the word "one" in Danish and Norwegian). In Norwegian, however, the neuter word "one" is spelled ett. Then, the acute points out that there is one and only one of the object, which derives from the obsolete spelling(s) een and eet. Some loanwords, mainly from French, are also written with the acute accent, such as Norwegian and Swedish kafé and Danish café (also cafe).
Spanish marks stressed syllables in polysyllabic words that deviate from the standardized stress patterns. In monosyllabic words, it is used to distinguish homophones, e.g.: el (the) and él (he).
Tagalog dictionaries including other Philippine languages use the acute accent to mark a vowel in a syllable with lexical stress (Diín) and avoid ambiguity. Combinations include á, í, ó, and ú while é is the rarest one. Since they are not part of the official alphabet, these vowels do not affect the order of each letter. Vowels with a stress at the first syllable are left unwritten and serves as the default word. For example, baka (cow) and baká (maybe).
Bislama. One of the two orthographies distinguishes éTemplate:IPA from eTemplate:IPA.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The orthography after 1995 does not distinguish these sounds, and has no diacritics.
French. The acute is used on é. It is known as accent aigu, in contrast to the accent grave which is the accent sloped the other way. It distinguishes éTemplate:IPA from èTemplate:IPA, êTemplate:IPA, and eTemplate:IPA. Unlike in other Romance languages, the accent marks do not imply stress in French.
Italian. The acute accent (sometimes called accento chiuso, "closed accent" in Italian) is compulsory only in words of more than one syllable stressed on their final vowel (and a few other words). Words ending in stressed -o are never marked with an acute accent (ó), but with a grave accent (ò). Therefore, only é and è are normally contrasted, typically in words ending in -ché, such as perché ("why/because"); in the conjugated copulaè ("is"); in ambiguous monosyllables such as né ('neither') vs.ne ('of it') and sé ('itself') vs.se ('if'); and some verb forms, e.g.poté ("he/she/it could" (past tense)). The symbol ó can be used in the body of a word for disambiguation, for instance between bótte ("barrel") and bòtte ("beating"), though this is not mandatory: in fact standard Italian keyboards lack a dedicated ó key.
Portuguese. The vowels áTemplate:IPAslink, éTemplate:IPAslink and óTemplate:IPAslink are stressed low vowels, in opposition to âTemplate:IPAslink, êTemplate:IPAslink and ôTemplate:IPAslink which are stressed high vowels. However, the accent is only used in words whose stressed syllable is in an unpredictable location within the word: where the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, no accent is used, and the height of the stressed vowel cannot then usually be determined solely from the word's spelling.
In the Quốc Ngữ system for Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for Cantonese, the Pinyinromanization for Mandarin Chinese, and the Bopomofosemi-syllabary, the acute accent indicates a rising tone. In Mandarin, the alternative to the acute accent is the number 2 after the syllable: lái = lai2. In Cantonese Yale, the acute accent is either tone 2, or tone 5 if the vowel(s) are followed by 'h' (if the number form is used, 'h' is omitted): má = ma2, máh = ma5.
The acute accent is used in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high-rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.
The acute accent is used to disambiguate certain words which would otherwise be homographs in the following languages:
Catalan. Examples: són "they are" vs. son "tiredness", més "more" vs. mes "month".
Danish. Examples: én "one" vs. en "a/an"; fór "went" vs. for "for"; véd "know(s)" vs. ved "by"; gǿr "bark(s)" vs. gør "do(es)"; dǿr "die(s)" vs. dør "door"; allé "alley" vs. alle "everybody". Furthermore, it is also used for the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere, which lose their final e and might be mistaken for plurals of a noun (which most often end in -er): analysér is the imperative form of at analysere "to analyse", analyser is "analyses", plural of the noun analyse "analysis". Using an acute accent is always optional, never required.
Dutch. Examples: één "one" vs. een "a/an"; vóór "before" vs. voor "for"; vóórkomen "to exist/to happen" vs. voorkómen "to prevent/to avoid". Using an acute accent is mostly optional.
Modern Greek. Although all polysyllabic words have an acute accent on the stressed syllable, in monosyllabic words the presence or absence of an accent may disambiguate. The most common case is Template:Char, the feminine definite article ("the"), versus Template:Char, meaning "or". Other cases include Template:Lang ("who"/"which") versus Template:Lang ("where") and Template:Lang ("that", as in "he told me that...") versus Template:Lang ("how").
Norwegian. It is used to indicate stress on a vowel otherwise not expected to have stress. Most words are stressed on the first syllable and diacritical marks are rarely used. Although incorrect, it is frequently used to mark the imperative form of verbs ending in -ere as it is in Danish: kontrollér is the imperative form of "to control", kontroller is the noun "controls". The simple past of the verb å fare, "to travel", can optionally be written fór, to distinguish it from for (preposition "for" as in English), fôr "feed" n./"lining", or fòr (only in Nynorsk) "narrow ditch, trail by plow" (all the diacritics in these examples are optional.<ref>Norwegian language council, Diacritics (in Norwegian)Template:Webarchive</ref>)
Russian. Acute accents (technically, stress marks) are used in dictionaries to indicate the stressed syllable. They may also be optionally used to disambiguate both between minimal pairs, such as за́мок (read as zámak, means "castle") and замо́к (read as zamók, means "lock"), and between question words and relative pronouns such as что ("what", stressed, or "that", unstressed), similarly to Spanish. This is rare, however, as usually meaning is determined by context and no stress mark is written. The same rules apply to Ukrainian, Rusyn, Belarusian and Bulgarian.
Spanish. Covers various question word / relative pronoun pairs where the first is stressed and the second is a clitic, such as cómo (interrogative "how") and como (non-interrogative "how", comparative "like", "I eat"<ref>This makes "¿Cómo como? Como como como." correct sentences (How I eat? I eat like I eat.)</ref>), differentiates qué (what) from que (that), and some other words such as tú "you" and tu "your," té "tea" and te "you" (direct/indirect object), él "he/him" and el ("the", masculine). This usage of the acute accent is called tilde diacrítica.
In Danish, the acute accent can also be used for emphasis, especially on the word der (there), as in Der kan ikke være mange mennesker dér, meaning "There can't be many people there" or Dér skal vi hen meaning "That's where we're going".
In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, Dit is ónze auto, niet die van jullie, "This is our car, not yours." In this example, ónze is merely an emphasized form of onze. Also in family names like Piét, Piél, Plusjé, Hofsté. The IJ digraph can be stressed with íj́ but is usually stressed as íj for technical reasons.
In the Armenian script emphasis on a word is marked by an acute accent above the word's stressed vowel; it is traditionally grouped with the Armenian question and exclamation marks which are also diacritics applied to the stressed vowel.
In Faroese, the acute accent is used on five of the vowels (a, i, o, u and y), but these letters, á, í, ó, ú and ý are considered separate letters with separate pronunciations.
Despite this difference, in most of the cases, these two pairs are arranged as equal in collation, just like the other pairs (see above) that only differ in length.
In Icelandic the acute accent is used on all 6 of the vowels (a, e, i, o, u and y), and, like in Faroese, these are considered separate letters.File:Icelandic Text Extract.jpgA sample extract of Icelandic.
All can be either short or long, but the pronunciation of é is not the same short and long.
Etymologically, vowels with an acute accent in these languages correspond to their Old Norse counterparts, which were long vowels but in many cases have become diphthongs. The only exception is é, which in Faroese has become æ.
In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform, an acute accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the second representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus su is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value Template:IPA, while sú transliterates the second sign with the value Template:IPA.Template:Clarify
In Emilian, é ó denote both length and height, representing [e, o].
In Northern Sámi, an acute accent was placed over the corresponding Latin letter to represent the letters peculiar to this language (Áá, Čč, Đđ, Ŋŋ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž) when typing when there was no way of entering these letters correctly otherwise.<ref name="Svonni">Template:Cite book</ref>
Many Norwegian words of French origin retain an acute accent, such as allé, kafé, idé, komité. Popular usage can be sketchy and often neglects the accent, or results in the grave accent erroneously being used in its place. Likewise, in Swedish, the acute accent is used only for the letter Template:Angbr, mostly in words of French origin and in some names. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel quantity as well as quality and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include café ("café") and resumé ("résumé", noun). There are two pairs of homographs that are differentiated only by the accent: armé ("army") versus arme ("poor; pitiful", masculine gender) and idé ("idea") versus ide ("winter quarters").
As with other diacritical marks, a number of (usually French) loanwords are sometimes spelled in English with an acute accent as used in the original language: these include attaché, blasé, canapé, cliché, communiqué, café, décor, déjà vu, détente, élite, entrée, exposé, mêlée, fiancé, fiancée, papier-mâché, passé, pâté, piqué, plié, repoussé, résumé, risqué, sauté, roué, séance, naïveté and touché. Retention of the accent is common only in the French ending é or ée, as in these examples, where its absence would tend to suggest a different pronunciation. Thus the French word résumé is commonly seen in English as Template:Sic, with only one accent (but also with both or none).
Acute accents are sometimes added to loanwords where a final e is not silent, for example, maté from Spanish mate, the Maldivian capital Malé,saké from Japanese sake, and Pokémon from the Japanese compound for pocket monster, the last three from languages which do not use the Roman alphabet, and where transcriptions do not normally use acute accents.
For foreign terms used in English that have not been assimilated into English or are not in general English usage, italics are generally used with the appropriate accents: for example, coup d'état, pièce de résistance, crème brûlée and ancien régime.
The acute accent is sometimes (though rarely) used for poetic purposes:
It can mark stress on an unusual syllable: for example, caléndar to indicate Template:IPA (rather than the standard Template:IPA).
It can disambiguate stress where the distinction is metrically important: for example, rébel (as opposed to rebél), or áll trádes, to show that the phrase is pronounced as a spondee, rather than the more natural iamb.
It can indicate the sounding of an ordinarily silent letter: for example, pickéd to indicate the pronunciation Template:IPA, rather than standard Template:IPA (the grave accent is more common for this last purpose).
The layout of some European PC keyboards, combined with problematic keyboard-driver semantics, causes some users to use an acute accent or a grave accent instead of an apostrophe when typing in English (e.g. typing Template:As written or Template:As written instead of John's).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Acute accent in multiple fonts.Acute accent in multiple computer fonts. Gray letters indicate o kreska in the provided font. Notice that kreska in gray letters are steeper than acute accent in black letters. Also in Adobe HeiTi Std and SimSun, the stroke goes from bottom-left (thicker) to top-right (thinner), showing the rising nature of the tone; however, the acute accent in SimHei is made without variation in thickness.
Western typographic and calligraphic traditions generally design the acute accent as going from top to bottom. French even has the definition of acute is the accent Template:Lang (Template:Langx),<ref>Template:Citation</ref> meaning that it descends from top right to lower left.
In Polish, the Template:Lang diacritic is used instead, which usually has a different shape and style compared to other European languages. It features a more vertical steep form and is moved more to the right side of center line than acute. As Unicode does not differentiate the Template:Lang from acute, letters from Western (computer) fonts and Polish fonts had to share the same set of code points, which make designing the conflicting character (i.e. o acute, Template:Angbr) more troublesome. OpenType tried to solve this problem by giving language-sensitive glyph substitution to designers such that the font would automatically switch between Western Template:Angbr and Polish Template:Angbr based on language settings.<ref name="kreska" /> New computer fonts are sensitive to this issue and their design for the diacritics tends toward a more "universal design" so that there will be less need for localization, for example Roboto and Noto typefaces.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Pinyin uses the acute accent to mark the second tone (rising or high-rising tone), which indicates a tone rising from low to high, causing the writing stroke of acute accent to go from lower left to top right. This contradicts the Western typographic tradition which makes designing the acute accent in Chinese typefaces a problem. Designers approach this problem in 3 ways: either keep the original Western form of going top right (thicker) to bottom left (thinner) (e.g. Arial/Times New Roman), flip the stroke to go from bottom left (thicker) to top right (thinner) (e.g. Adobe HeiTi Std/SimSun), or just make the accents without stroke variation (e.g. SimHei).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
Because keyboards have only a limited number of keys, US standard keyboards do not have keys for accented characters. An alternative method is the 'dead key', a key that modifies the meaning of the next key press. This method was used with typewriters where, when the typist typed an accent, the carriage did not move as usual with the effect that the next letter would be written on the same place on the paper. An appropriate keyboard mapping (such as US-International) provides this function via the right-hand Alt key. Thus Template:Keypress (apostrophe) is a dead key so appears to have no effect until the next key is pressed, when it adds the desired acute accent.
