Acute (´), circumflex (ˆ) and grave (`) accents: when and why

Accents aren't decoration — they carry real information. Say avó (grandmother) with a closed O and you've just said avô (grandfather). Drop the accent on é (is) and it becomes e (and). These little marks tell you which syllable to stress and whether a vowel is open or closed — so getting them right is the difference between ordering a café and getting a blank stare.

The grave in à, however, tells you that a contraction has taken place, not where the stress falls.

Good news: Portuguese has only three accent marks, and each does one clear job. The acute and circumflex sit on the stressed vowel, so they also tell you where to put the stress. The grave has a different job: it marks a contraction called crase, not stress.

Acute (´) = open + stressed

The acute opens the vowel and stresses it:

The famous pair

• "Meu avô mora aqui" [aˈvo] (My grandfather lives here)

• "Minha avó é professora" [aˈvɔ] (My grandmother is a teacher)

Everyday words

• "Quero um café" (I want a coffee)

• "Você está aqui?" (Are you here?)

• "É muito bom!" (It's very good!)

• "Até amanhã!" (See you tomorrow!)

• "Só isso" (Just that)

The crase à

The crase isn't everywhere

You write à when a + a combine. With the masculine article o, the contraction is ao: Vou ao mercado, not "à". Before a verb, the preposition stays plain: Começo a falar (I start to speak). Demonstratives are a separate case: Vou àquele mercado uses a + aquele.

Words that lost their accent (2009 reform)

The spelling agreement stripped accents off some words:

• idéia → ideia

• vôo → voo

But the everyday ones kept theirs: café, você, avó.

Stressed one-syllable words

Not every stressed monosyllable takes a written accent: mar, sol and bem do not. The endings matter: a(s), e(s), o(s) and the open diphthongs éi(s), éu(s), ói(s) take an accent when stressed.

Open a Brazilian dictionary and you'll find econômico, Antônio and fenômeno wearing a circumflex (closed ô) — yet the very same words appear in Portugal as económico, António and fenómeno with an acute (open ó). It's no mistake: the mark you pick literally encodes the vowel's timbre, and Brazil simply closes those vowels where Portugal opens them. The 1990 spelling agreement gave up trying to merge the two and now accepts both.

Sources: Migalhas — Gramatigalhas, Português com Pestana