accentuation

Accentuation refers to two related aspects of language: the emphasis placed on syllables in spoken utterances and the use of written diacritics to signal pronunciation and related features. In linguistics, accentuation describes both phonological stress patterns that influence rhythm and intonation, and orthographic marks that indicate how a word should be pronounced or how its vowels relate to one another.

Phonological accentuation concerns which syllables are prominent, typically through increased loudness, higher pitch, and longer duration. Stress can be contrastive in some languages, enabling minimal pairs and affecting intelligibility, rhythm, and word class. English exhibits variable stress, while many Romance languages have more regular patterns with occasional irregularities that may be indicated in writing by accent marks.

Orthographic accentuation uses diacritics such as acute, grave, circumflex, and diaeresis to convey pronunciation, vowel quality, or historic vowel length. In Spanish, the acute accent on vowels marks irregular stress; in French, acute and grave signs differentiate vowel sounds; in Portuguese, circumflex or acute marks indicate vowel quality and sometimes stress position. Some languages use diacritics to indicate tone or phonemic distinctions beyond stress alone, such as Vietnamese with tone marks or Turkish with letters that distinguish phonemes.

In writing systems, accentuation aids disambiguation and pronunciation, while in technology it is encoded in character sets such as Unicode. Learners of languages often rely on accent marks to infer correct pronunciation and to recognize word forms, while typographers consider diacritic placement essential for legibility and fidelity to the original language.