Stress in Spanish is functional: to change the placement of stress changes the meaning of a sentence or phrase: for example, célebre, celebre, and celebré contrast by stress. There is some variance between Spanish dialects; a speaker of Rioplatense Spanish will pronounce boina as while a speaker of Colombian Spanish will pronounce it as.
Transcription
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.
Position
Stress usually occurs in three positions in Spanish: on the final syllable, the penultimate syllable, and the antepenultimate syllable. 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.
Creating contrasts
All Spanish words have at least one stressed syllable when they are used in isolation. The word para can be a verb or a preposition. When words are used the stress can be dropped depending on the part of speech. Para el coche can mean "stop the car" if the stress remains. If the stress is removed, it means "for the car". In English, contrasts are made by reducing vowels, changing the volume of the word, or changing the intonation of the phrase. For example, this is her car emphasizes the owner of the car. If the stress is changed to say this is her car, the emphasis is on showing what object belongs to a specific person. In Spanish, the stress is almost always changed by reordering the words. Using the same example este coche es suyo emphasizes the owner and éste es su coche emphasizes the object.
All Spanish words can be classified into one of four groups based on the position of their stress. If the last syllable is stressed it falls into the aguda category. Aguda words generally end in a consonant other than n or s, or are a conjugated verb that ends in an accented, stressed vowel. If the stress falls on the second to last syllable, it is classified as a llana or grave. Llanas typically are words that end in n, s, or a vowel. Any exceptions have a written accent. If the stress is placed on the third to last or the fourth to last syllable, they are categorized as esdrújulas or sobresdrújulas, respectively. In either of the last two categories, the stressed syllable must be accented to break the rules of the first two categories. No single Spanish word is classified as a sobresdrújula, only compound verbs like diciéndonosla.
