THE WRITTEN ACCENT
It marks the stress
In Spanish the accent (tilde) is a small stroke over a vowel that shows the stressed syllable. It always slants like ´, never like `: camión, not camiòn.
Check a word
WHAT THE ACADEMY SAYS
Write it the
Spanish way.
Three small marks carry a lot of Spanish.
The written accent, the opening ¿ and ¡, and the letter ñ all follow clear rules set out by the Real Academia Española and its partner academies. Here they are, in plain English.
¿ ¡ Ñ small marks, set rules
Check a word- Accent the stress
- Open every question
- Keep the eñe
- Clear rules, cleaner text
THE SHORT ANSWER
Three marks,
one set of rules.
Spanish spelling is close to how words sound.
These marks fill the gaps the letters leave.
¿ AND ¡
Open the question too
The opening marks are characteristic of Spanish, and the RAE says not to drop them in imitation of other languages: ¿Qué hora es?, not Qué hora es?
How to use them
THE EÑE
A letter of its own
Ñ is the fifteenth letter of the Spanish alphabet. It began as a medieval shorthand: scribes wrote nn as one n with a wavy line on top.
See the numbers
FOUR HABITS TO TRY
Cleaner Spanish,
one mark at a time.
None of these needs a new keyboard. They are the small checks that make Spanish text look right to a Spanish reader.
Open the question where it starts
Put ¿ or ¡ where the question or exclamation begins, even mid-sentence: Hoy es tu cumpleaños, ¿no?
Keep accents on capitals
Capital letters take the accent too: Ángel, PROHIBIDO PISAR EL CÉSPED. Only the capitals in acronyms go without.
Never swap ñ for n
Ñ is a separate letter, and a separate character in the Unicode standard (U+00F1, capital U+00D1), not an n with a mark added later.
Leave solo and este plain
The RAE says an accent to separate the adverb solo, or pronouns like este and ese, is not justified.
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
A small alphabet,
a big language.
One figure on the Spanish alphabet,
one on why it matters in the UK.
27 letters
Letters in the Spanish alphabet
The RAE lists twenty-seven letters, from a to z with ñ in fifteenth place. Ch and ll were once counted as letters but are now treated as digraphs: two letters for one sound.
THE ALPHABET · RAE
No. 1 of 10
Spanish among ten languages for the UK
The British Council’s 2017 Languages for the Future report ranked Spanish first of the ten foreign languages the UK needs most, ahead of Mandarin, French, Arabic and German.
UK NEEDS · BRITISH COUNCIL
The British Council ranking combined economic and non-market indicators, from UK exports and business needs to tourism, diplomacy and the public’s language interests, using sources published after June 2016.
A QUICK WORD CHECK
Does it need
an accent?
Pick the kind of word to see when Spanish writes the accent. The bar shows how often that kind of word takes one.
Based on the general accent rules in the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (RAE and ASALE). Diacritic pairs such as tú and tu follow their own rule.
WHY THE OPENING MARK
Spanish shows
where it begins.
English signals a question with a helper such as “do”, and French can use “est-ce que”. Spanish has no such introducer and no special word order for questions, so the opening ¿ shows the reader where the questioning tone starts.
Some short words use the accent another way. The diacritic accent separates a stressed word from an unstressed twin: tú (you) and tu (your), él (he) and el (the), dé (give) and de (of), and question words such as dónde.
Questions
Questions people ask
Do capital letters need accents in Spanish?
Yes. The RAE says capitals must carry the accent when the rules call for it, whether as an initial or in a word written all in capitals, as in Ángel. Capitals in acronyms are the exception.
Can I leave out the upside-down question mark?
Not in standard writing. The RAE calls the opening ¿ and ¡ characteristic of Spanish and says they should not be dropped in imitation of languages that only use the closing mark. Only a few special uses leave them out.
Are ch and ll still letters?
No. They were traditionally counted as letters, but the RAE now treats them as digraphs, two letters for one sound. The Spanish alphabet has twenty-seven letters, with ñ as the fifteenth.
Does solo take an accent?
The RAE says the accent once used to tell the adverb solo from the adjective is not justified, and the same goes for este, ese and aquel used as pronouns. Write them without one.
Why is the wavy line on ñ also called a tilde?
In Spanish, tilde names both the written accent and the small stroke that forms part of some letters, such as ñ. The ñ grew out of medieval scribes abbreviating nn as an n with a wavy line above.
Sources
- RAE and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: tilde (accent rules)
- RAE and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: signos de interrogación y exclamación
- RAE and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: ñ
- RAE and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas: abecedario
- Unicode Consortium code chart: C1 Controls and Latin-1 Supplement (U+0080 to U+00FF)
- British Council: Languages for the Future (2017)
Updated