misaccented

Misaccented is an adjective used to describe both spoken and written language when the expected accent or diacritic marks are placed inaccurately. In linguistics and language use, the term covers misaccentuation in pronunciation as well as misaccented orthography.

In pronunciation, misaccentuation occurs when the primary stress of a word is placed on the wrong syllable. In languages with contrastive stress, this can affect intelligibility and may change perceived meaning or formality. A common English example involves words that change meaning with stress, such as record and present, where different stress patterns are conventional for noun versus verb usage; misplacing stress can sound nonstandard to listeners.

In orthography, misaccented writes or marks may occur when diacritics are incorrect or on the wrong letters. This includes using café without an acute accent, naïve without the diaeresis, or résumé without the proper accents; or applying diacritics to the wrong characters due to keyboard layouts or font limitations.

Causes range from language transfer in second language learning, insufficient exposure to standard pronunciation, typographical or encoding errors, to automatic text processing that misapplies diacritics. In digital corpora and search systems, misaccented data can hinder retrieval and analysis if diacritics are inconsistently used.

See also: accent, diacritic, stress, prosody, orthography.