Spanish Accents and Punctuation

Spanish uses a few accent and punctuation conventions that have no direct equivalent in English, and getting them right is part of writing the language correctly. The two most distinctive are the written accent, which sits over a vowel and can change both stress and meaning, and the inverted question and exclamation marks that open a question or exclamation.

Spanish uses a single accent mark, the acute accent, which appears over the five vowels: á, é, í, ó, ú. It does two jobs.

First, it marks stress that breaks the default rules. Spanish stress is predictable: words ending in a vowel, n or s are normally stressed on the second-to-last syllable, and other words on the last syllable. When a word breaks this pattern, a written accent shows where the stress actually falls, as in café, canción and rápido.

Second, it distinguishes words that are otherwise spelled identically. This is called the diacritical accent, and it separates several very common word pairs.

Question words also carry an accent when they ask something, whether directly or indirectly: qué (what), quién (who), dónde (where), cuándo (when) and cómo (how), as in ¿Qué quieres? (What do you want?).

The Diaeresis and the Tilde

Two other marks appear over letters. The diaeresis (ü) is written over u in the combinations güe and güi to show that the u is pronounced, as in pingüino (penguin) and vergüenza (shame). The tilde over n creates the separate letter ñ, covered in full on the alphabet page.

Inverted Question and Exclamation Marks

The most visible feature of Spanish punctuation is that questions and exclamations are marked at both ends. A question opens with an inverted (upside-down) question mark and closes with the usual one, and an exclamation does the same with exclamation marks.

• ¿Cómo estás? → How are you?
• ¡Qué sorpresa! → What a surprise!

The opening mark is placed at the start of the question or exclamation itself, which is not always the start of the sentence. In María, ¿vienes con nosotros? the inverted mark begins only at the question.

Other Punctuation

Most other Spanish punctuation matches English, with a few differences worth noting. Spanish traditionally uses angular quotation marks, called comillas latinas (« »), although the English style is now common. In numbers, many Spanish-speaking countries use a comma for decimals and a full stop for thousands, the reverse of English.