Accentuation — The Rules of Stress

Accentuation — The Rules of Stress

In order to pronounce Spanish words with more than one syllable, the following rules must be learned well enough so that they can be applied automatically to any unfamiliar word.

The Rules of Stress

Words that end in a vowel, or in the consonants n or s, normally are stressed (accented) on the next to the last syllable. In the following list, the words are divided into syllables, and the syllable receiving the stress is underlined.

ju-lio	July	u-no	one, a
a-mi-go	friend	fe-cha	date
tra-ba-jo	work	vier-nes	Friday

Words that end in a consonant, other than n or s, usually receive the stress on the last syllable.

ve-nir	to come	ca-lor	heat
ac-triz	actress	pa-pel	paper
le-er	to read	mu-jer	woman

Note: Since infinitives end in -ar, -er, or -ir, they receive the stress on the last syllable.

ha-blar

to speak

es-cri-bir

to write

Words which are not stressed according to these two rules bear a written accent on the syllable that is stressed in pronunciation.

fá-cil	easy	a-quí	here
di-fí-cil	difficult	ár-bo-les	trees

Exception

Adverbs that end in -mente create an important exception to the preceding three rules. These -mente adverbs have two stresses. The first stress falls on the stressed syllable of the adjective from which is was formed, and the second stress falls on the next to last syllable.

bo-ni-ta-men-te

prettily

fe-liz-men-te

happily