Español en serio

The Spanish Accent

Dieser Beitrag erklärt ein wichtiges Thema der spanischen Grammatik (Text auf Englisch).

In Spanish, words with only one syllable don’t carry an accent, because it is not necessary to show where the stress is. The stress is always inherent in the syllable. However, we make an important exception. When we have one word with two meanings, we mark one with an accent to distinguish them. It’s like having twins: one of them is dressed in red and the other in blue. Look:

Tú eres María. You are Mary.
Tu perro es negro. Your dog is black.
Él es Juan. He is John.
El coche de Juan. John’s car (literally, the car of John).
Sí, soy Laura. Yes, I am Laura.
Si quieres, salimos. If you want, we go out.
Esto es para mí. This is for me.
Mi casa es pequeña. My house is small.
Te doy el dinero. I give you the money.
Quiero beber té. I want to drink tea.
Se puede entrar aquí. One can go in here.
No sé qué es esto. I don’t know what this is.

Something relatively similar happens with these forms:

¿Por qué tienes prisa? Why are you in a hurry?
Porque tengo que ir al aeropuerto. Because I have to go to the airport.

Read the blog to know much more about these forms:

25. Porque, por que, porqué, por qué

Diacritics and accents

Some people think that the little curve in the letter Ñ is an accent. This is a mistake. In many languages, we have special symbols called diacritics, which can go on top, below or along with the letter, and could indicate a particular pronunciation or stress. Accents are one type of diacritic, and in Spanish, they always show you in which part of the word you must release more air:

Ár-bol (tree)
Jar-dín (garden)

You need to pronounce these words stressing the syllable with the accent.

Now, what you have in the letter Ñ is a diacritic indicating something totally different. It means that this is a nasal sound, so you release the air through the nose and not through the mouth. Don’t worry, you don’t need to think about it, your anatomy does the job!

And what’s the origin of this letter? In Latin, there were many words with double N, but you know how expensive it was to write on parchment, so the copists tried to save space and, instead of NN, they started writing only one N with a little curve on top. They also did that with the combination MN. Examples:

somnus → sonnus → sueño (dream)
annus → annu → año (year)

If you can read in Spanish, here is my blog about this letter:

20. Lengua. La letra Ñ

Example from the episode

Read the full episode here →

Episode 5