Острый акцент: история и применение в различных языках

Diacritic, rising from left to right

The acute accent (/ə/'/k//j//uː//t/), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed characters are available.

An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.

The acute accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient Greek, where it indicated a syllable with a high pitch. In Modern Greek, a stress accent has replaced the pitch accent, and the acute marks the stressed syllable of a word. The Greek name of the accented syllable was and is ὀξεῖα (oxeîa, Modern Greek oxía) "sharp" or "high", which was calqued (loan translated) into Latin as acutus "sharpened".

Arabic and Persian: were used in western transliteration of Islamic language texts from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Representing the long vowels, they are typically transcribed with a macron today except in Bahá'í orthography. Classical Latin: sometimes used to represent the apex in modern orthography. Czech: are the long versions of The accent is known as čárka. To indicate a long in the middle or at the end of a word, a [[ring (diacritic) ("ring") is used instead, to form Hungarian: are the long equivalents of the vowels (see double acute accent) are the long equivalents of Both types of accents are known as hosszú ékezet (hosszú means long). The letters and are two long vowels but they are also distinct in quality, rather than being the long equivalents of and (see below in Letter extension). Irish: are the long equivalents of the vowels , the accent affects pronunciation and meaning, e. g. Seán ("John") but sean ("old"). The accent is known as a (síneadh) fada ("long (sign)"), which is also used in Hiberno English. Old Norse: are the long versions of Sometimes, is used as the long version of , but is used more often. Sometimes, the short lived Old Icelandic long (also written ) is written using an acute accented form, , or a version with a macron, , but usually it is not distinguished from from which it is derived by u mutation. Slovak: the acute accent is called dĺžeň in Slovak. In addition to the long vowels , dĺžeň is used to mark syllabic consonants , which are the long counterparts of syllabic .

Ligurian: in the official orthography, é is used for short , and ó is used for short .

A graphically similar, but not identical, mark is indicative of a palatalized sound in several languages. In Polish, such a mark is known as a kreska ("stroke") and is an integral part of several letters: four consonants and one vowel. When appearing in consonants, it indicates palatalization, similar to the use of the háček in Czech and other Slavic languages (e. g. sześć "six"). However, in contrast to the háček which is usually used for postalveolar consonants, the kreska denotes alveolo palatal consonants. In traditional Polish typography, the kreska is more nearly vertical than the acute accent, and placed slightly right of center. A similar rule applies to the Belarusian Latin alphabet Łacinka. However, for computer use, Unicode conflates the codepoints for these letters with those of the accented Latin letters of similar appearance. In Serbo Croatian, as in Polish, the letter is used to represent a voiceless alveolo palatal affricate
In the romanization of Macedonian, and represent the Cyrillic letters (Gje) and (Kje), which stand for palatal or alveolo palatal consonants, though and (or and ) are more commonly used for this purpose. The same two letters are used to transcribe the postulated Proto Indo European phonemes and
uses the acute for palatalization as in Polish: Lower also uses , and Lower previously used and , also written as ; these are now spelt as and .

In the Quốc Ngữ system for Vietnamese, the Yale romanization for Cantonese, the Pinyin romanization for Mandarin Chinese, and the Bopomofo semi syllabary, the acute accent indicates a rising tone. In Mandarin, the alternative to the acute accent is the number 2 after the syllable: lái = lai2. In Cantonese Yale, the acute accent is either tone 2, or tone 5 if the vowel(s) are followed by 'h' (if the number form is used, 'h' is omitted): má = ma2, máh = ma5. In African languages and Athabaskan languages, it frequently marks a high tone, e. g., Yoruba apá 'arm', Nobiin féntí 'sweet date', Ekoti kaláwa 'boat', Navajo t’áá 'just'. The acute accent is used in Serbo Croatian dictionaries and linguistic publications to indicate a high rising accent. It is not used in everyday writing.

In Danish, the acute accent can also be used for emphasis, especially on the word der (there), as in Der kan ikke være mange mennesker dér, meaning "There can't be many people there" or Dér skal vi hen meaning "That's where we're going". In Dutch, the acute accent can also be used to emphasize an individual word within a sentence. For example, Dit is ónze auto, niet die van jullie, "This is our car, not yours." In this example, ónze is merely an emphasized form of onze. Also in family names like Piét, Piél, Plusjé, Hofsté. The IJ digraph can be stressed with íj́ but is usually stressed as íj for technical reasons. In the Armenian script emphasis on a word is marked by an acute accent above the word's stressed vowel; it is traditionally grouped with the Armenian question and exclamation marks which are also diacritics applied to the stressed vowel.

In some Basque texts predating Standard Basque, the letters and carry acute accents (an invention by Sabino Arana), which are otherwise indicated by double letters. In such cases, is used to represent (a trilled , this spelling is used even at the end of a syllable, to differentiate from , an alveolar tap in Basque in word final positions is always trilled) and for (a palatalized ). In transliterating texts written in Cuneiform, an acute accent over the vowel indicates that the original sign is the second representing that value in the canonical lists. Thus su is used to transliterate the first sign with the phonetic value , while sú transliterates the second sign with the value
In Emilian, é ó denote both length and height, representing [e, o]. In Indonesian dictionaries, is used to represent , while is used to represent In Northern Sámi, an acute accent was placed over the corresponding Latin letter to represent the letters peculiar to this language (Áá, Čč, Đđ, Ŋŋ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž) when typing when there was no way of entering these letters correctly otherwise. Many Norwegian words of French origin retain an acute accent, such as allé, kafé, idé, komité. Popular usage can be sketchy and often neglects the accent, or results in the grave accent erroneously being used in its place. Likewise, in Swedish, the acute accent is used only for the letter , mostly in words of French origin and in some names. It is used both to indicate a change in vowel quantity as well as quality and that the stress should be on this, normally unstressed, syllable. Examples include café ("café") and resumé ("résumé", noun). There are two pairs of homographs that are differentiated only by the accent: armé ("army") versus arme ("poor; pitiful", masculine gender) and idé ("idea") versus ide ("winter quarters"). and are used in Pashto in the Latin alphabet, equivalent to and , respectively. In Romagnol, é ó denote both length and height, representing [eː, oː].

Western typographic and calligraphic traditions generally design the acute accent as going from top to bottom. French even has the definition of acute is the accent «qui va de droite à gauche» , meaning that it descends from top right to lower left. In Polish, the kreska diacritic is used instead, which usually has a different shape and style compared to other European languages. It features a more vertical steep form and is moved more to the right side of center line than acute. As Unicode does not differentiate the kreska from acute, letters from Western (computer) fonts and Polish fonts had to share the same set of code points, which make designing the conflicting character (i. e. o acute, ) more troublesome. OpenType tried to solve this problem by giving language sensitive glyph substitution to designers such that the font would automatically switch between Western and Polish based on language settings. Pinyin uses the acute accent to mark the second tone (rising or high rising tone), which indicates a tone rising from low to high, causing the writing stroke of acute accent to go from lower left to top right. This contradicts the Western typographic tradition which makes designing the acute accent in Chinese typefaces a problem. Designers approach this problem in 3 ways: either keep the original Western form of going top right (thicker) to bottom left (thinner) (e. g. Arial/Times New Roman), flip the stroke to go from bottom left (thicker) to top right (thinner) (e. g. Adobe HeiTi Std/SimSun), or just make the accents without stroke variation (e. g. SimHei).

Unicode encodes a number of cases of "letter with acute accent" as precomposed characters and these are displayed below. In addition, many more symbols may be composed using the combining character facility ( and ) that may be used with any letter or other diacritic to create a customised symbol but this does not mean that the result has any real world application and are not shown in the table.

On macOS computers, an acute accent is placed on a vowel by pressing and then the vowel, which can also be capitalised; for example, á is formed by pressing and then , and Á is formed by pressing and then .

Because keyboards have only a limited number of keys, US English keyboards do not have keys for accented characters. The concept of dead key, a key that modified the meaning of the next key press, was developed to overcome this problem. This acute accent key was already present on typewriters where it typed the accent without moving the carriage, so a normal letter could be written on the same place. The US International layout provides this function: is a dead key so appears to have no effect until the next key is pressed, when it adds the desired accute accent. Computers sold in Europe (including UK) have an ('alternate graphic') key which adds a third and (with the Shift key) fourth effect to most keys. Thus produces and produces .