Rules of word stress

Those of you who have children at Spanish schools, or have contact with the way Spanish children learn their own language, may be aware of how they are taught the rules for the accents on words.

Of course, they already know how to pronounce each word perfectly, so what they need to learn is a series of written rules, and they learn wonderful words in the process like ‘ esdrújula’; although we will never need to know what it means!

Although they plough through these things at school, many Spanish people are unsure of where accents should be written on words, because to them the subject is purely academic.

We as foreign language learners need to have a completely different approach to the subject from Spanish schoolchildren, as we do not have their advantage of already knowing how each word should sound.

So for us, the accents on words provide us with essential information about how we should pronounce a word.

The great thing about Spanish, as I never tire of telling my students, is that it is a regular language with consistent spelling rules, which tell us everything we need to know about how a word should be said.

This means that what might seem irrelevant to a Spanish schoolchild is a lifesaver for those of us who are learning the language.

Before we get on to the accents though, we need to learn the basic rules of wordstress. They are very straightforward so here goes.

Rule number one: when a word ends in a vowel, or the consonants ‘ s’ or ‘ n’ the beat of the word falls on the last but one syllable, ( a syllable is the section of sound in a word.)

For example: MEsa, doMINgo, HoraDAda, LIBros, JOven. Rule number two: when a word ends in a consonant other than ‘ s’ or ‘ n’ the beat goes on the final syllable. For example: fenomenAL, reLOJ, reguLAR, feLIZ.

That in theory covers all eventualities, but there is a third rule, and here it is: any variation from these two previous rules is marked with an accent.

For example: sábado, sofá, lápiz, estación. These four words ‘ should’ obey either rule one or rule two, but as their pronunciation does not fit in with either, an accent shows us how the rule is broken.

This might take you a while to ‘ get your head round’ ( as they say) but I can assure you that all Spanish words work in exactly the same way.

This means we can have confidence to give the right emphasis to every word we say, as we never have the awful ‘ to deSERT someone in a DEsert’ problem that we have in English.

There is one more rather important thing I haven’t told you about this which completes the whole picture, and that is exactly what can be described as a syllable.

I said before that it is a ‘ section of sound’ in a word, and with simple words like ‘ cortinas’, I think it is easy to work out that it has three syllables.

However, there is something we need to know about vowel combinations, which sometimes count as one beat, and sometimes count as two beats.

This will take a while to explain so I will leave it till next week. It’s very exciting.