PART I

One of the things I often noticed about my Spanish students was the difficulty they had knowing where to place the stress when pronouncing words. I don’t remember learning this explicitly in my high school Spanish classes (although I probably did) and I suppose I expected my students to intuit this aspect of the language—I tried to avoid bogging them down with tedious “rules” and instead wanted them to build awareness on their own. This worked for some of my students, but for others, it simply did not. For them, I broke out the rules. And since correct stress (knowing where the emphasis-denoted by a written accent or not-goes in a given word) is one of the quickest ways of improving your oral skills and facilitating comprehension for those listening to you, maybe this is one place where the rules are worth really nailing down. Knowing these rules also, in turn, tells you where the accents belong when writing in Spanish, something many native speakers are not always great at themselves!

So, here it goes.

In Spanish- as opposed to English- the natural stress has a fixed spot: any deviation from this placement requires a written accent. For all words ending in a vowel, n, or s, the natural stress falls on the vowel in the second-to-last syllable. For any words ending in a consonant OTHER than n or s, the natural stress is on the vowel in the last syllable.

Because of this, we know that casa is pronounced “cAsa”, examen is pronounced “exAmen”, and papel is pronounced “papEl”. When we pluralize words, we always want the stress to remain on the same vowel as the singular. This explains why, in the words above, only the plural of examen requires a written accent: casas and papeles are fine the way they are, but exámenes needs the accent to signal that we should say “exAmenes”. Without an accent, the word would be pronounced “examEnes” and that would be incorrect.

Got it??

Vowel, n, s = natural stress on second-to-last syllable

casa cAsa

examen exAmen

papeles papEles

hablo hAblo

mercado mercAdo

pesos pEsos

All consonants except n,s= natural stress on last syllable

pared parEd

papel papEl

reloj relOj

ordenador ordenadOr

Stress is somewhere other than its natural place=a written accent is needed:

autobús autobus not autObus

música mUsica not musIca

México MExico not MexIco

cartón cartOn not cArton

habló hablO not hAblo

Test it out by reading aloud. If a word doesn’t have a written accent, the rule of the natural stress tells you where to put the emphasis. If the word does have a written accent, it’s even easier—just stress whatever vowel carries the accent. And when writing, say the word to yourself and decide if the natural stress and the actual stress correspond—if they do, no accent is needed. But if the actual stress is somewhere else, put that accent in there.

Now, this isn’t all of it. What happens when two vowels are next to one another? Which vowel takes the stress or carries the written accent? This has to do with diphthongs and strong and weak vowel sounds, and makes things a bit more complicated. I will address this in Part 2 of “Pronunciation, Stress, and Written Accents.”