accentuations

Accentuation refers to two related concepts in language and writing. In linguistics, it denotes the assignment of prominence, or stress, to particular syllables within words, as well as broader patterns of prosody across phrases and sentences. In orthography, accentuations are the diacritical marks placed on letters to indicate pronunciation, tone, or syllabic distinction. The term is commonly used in the plural to cover both senses.

Linguistic accentuation: In most languages, stress placement helps distinguish word meaning, grammatical form, or part of speech, and it can interact with morphology. English shows variable stress with noun–verb pairs (record as a noun versus record as a verb). In many languages, stress patterns are fixed, phonemic, or predictable and can vary across dialects. Prosody also includes intonation, rhythm, and pitch contours that extend beyond individual syllables.

Orthographic accentuation: Diacritics such as acute (á), grave (à), circumflex (â), tilde (ã), diaeresis (ë) indicate vowel quality, length, tone, nasalization, or historical changes. Spanish uses acute accents to indicate stressed syllables and to distinguish homographs (sí versus si). French uses circumflex marks to signal historical letters and vowel quality. Portuguese marks nasalization with tilde and vowel openness with acute or circumflex. Other languages employ diacritics to denote tone, phoneme distinctions, or stress differences.

Computational and typographic considerations: Unicode encodes many accent marks and their combining forms, supporting normalization, search, and text rendering. Accentuation rules vary by language and can pose challenges for language learners, typesetters, and information retrieval systems. Understanding accentuation supports accurate pronunciation, comprehension, and proper orthographic conventions.