Spanish can be a tricky language to learn. While it does share many similar words with English, the grammar is nothing alike. This is why an English to Spanish translation online can yield bizarre results. One area where Spanish is arguably much easier than English is spelling and pronunciation. With a couple of exceptions, the rules are straightforward. But something strange an English speaker without knowledge of Spanish will encounter is the use of accent marks that modify the pronunciation of certain letters.

Here’s a crash course on what all those accent marks mean.

Tilde: This is the word for the squiggly line above the ñ that you see in words like español. The letter ñ in Spanish is called “enye” and pronounced exactly that way, like an and y together. Without the tilde, you could think of the word español spelled espanyol to indicate a similar pronunciation.

Diaeresis: Known as an umlaut in German, these two dots are found in Spanish above the letter u in specific circumstances. Normally, when the letter g is followed by the letter u, the sound produced is a guttural stop or a hard g. An example in English is the g sound in got, or gun. But when you should pronounce both the g and u, which is pronounced similarly to gw in English, this is indicated with a diaeresis.

Acute accent mark: Here’s where it starts to get a little tricky but bear with me. There are a few different uses for an acute accent mark (the right-angled vertical dash above a vowel) in Spanish. Here’s a brief description of each use:

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• Emphasis: If a Spanish word has no accents over the vowels then the emphasis falls in a specific place. For example, if a word has three vowels but none have an accent mark, the emphasis is on the second vowel. What do we mean by emphasis? Let’s look at the word emphasis itself. Here the emphasis is over the first vowel, e. If the emphasis were over the second vowel we would over-pronounce the a, emphAsis. The accent mark is used to shift the emphasis from the standard rule to another part of the word. So instead of saying Bogota like we do in English, in Spanish the a at the end is–BogotÁ.

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• Differentiating words: There are some words, particularly single-syllable words, in Spanish that are spelled exactly the same but have very different meanings. Since the emphasis cannot be changed if a word has only one syllable, the addition of an accent mark won’t affect the pronunciation at all. But it does help to differentiate the word when written. Some common examples include: se = reflexive you formal or plural, sé = I know / te = you or reflexive you informal, té = tea / solo = alone, sólo = only.

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• Questions: Words like where, when and who (donde, cuando and quien respectively) only take on accent marks when they’re used in a question. The pronunciation isn’t affected because the accent mark is placed above the letter that would naturally have the emphasis anyhow. So a phrase like, “the keys are where I left them,” “las llaves están donde las dejé,” the word donde (where) doesn’t have an accent mark. But if we turn that into a question: “¿Dónde están las llaves?” or “where are the keys,” the word dónde now has an accent mark.

Is your head spinning yet? Spanish, like English, has exceptions to just about every rule. But don’t get overwhelmed, instead leave your Spanish content up to the professionals. Get in touch to learn more.