Stress in Spanish

Stress in Spanish is functional: to change the placement of stress changes the meaning of a sentence or phrase: for example, célebre ('famous'), celebre ('[that] he/she celebrates'), and celebré ('I celebrated') contrast only by stress. There is some minor variance between Spanish dialects; a speaker of Rioplatense Spanish will pronounce boina ('beret') as ˈbojna while a speaker of Colombian Spanish will pronounce it as boˈina. Spanish has only two degrees of stress. In traditional transcription, primary stress is marked with an acute accent ( ́) over the vowel. Unstressed parts of a word are emphasized by placing a breve ( ̆) over the vowel if a mark is needed, or it is left unmarked. Stress usually occurs in three positions in Spanish: on the final syllable (oxytone, e.g. señor, ciudad), the penultimate syllable (paroxytone, e.g. señora, nosotros), or the antepenultimate syllable (proparoxytone, e.g. teléfono, sábado), although in very rare cases, it can come on the fourth-to-last syllable in compound words (see below). Vowel-final words and those ending in -s or -n are usually stressed on the penultimate syllable. That accounts for around 80% of Spanish vocabulary. There are almost no Spanish words with antepenultimate stress that have a complex syllable rime in the penult. For example, made-up words such as teléfosno, teléfiono and átasca are considered ill-formed by native speakers. There are a few exceptions, such as the Anglicisms Wáshington and Mánchester, and the town of Frómista in Spain. The trilled /r/, the palatal nasal /ɲ/, and the palatal lateral /ʎ/ are similarly excluded from the final syllable of proparoxytones. Thus chinchorro 'trawling net' is allowed, but the made-up chínchorro can be considered ungrammatical. That said, Spanish does have some words containing antepenultimate stress and trills in the final syllable onset, which are typically of onomatopoeic, Basque, or unknown origin: cháncharras-máncharras 'pretexts' (onomatopoeic), Chávarri (a last name of Basque origin), tábarro 'type of wasp'.