What are these small commas over some words. Does these help in speaking Spanish?

Question

What are these commas over some words like e etc. Does these commas helps us in reading,writing and speaking Spanish?

can you put some example? - ismarodri_uy, Oct 30, 2009

Answer 1

Those little marks are called "accents" and they let the reader know how to pronounce a word.

For example, with the word información the accent tells us to stress the last o in the word.

I find this sort of statement extremely annoying (in part, because it is made so often). Spanish orthography (including the use of diacritics) was not developed to aid foreigners learning Spanish (i.e. to help them to know where the stress falls). Native speakers of Spanish know perfectly well where the stress falls and the use of diacritics is simply to record that knowledge. They pronounce words that way because that is the way that they pronounce them, not because there is/isn't a tilde. Foreigners may use tildes as a guide to pronunciation but Spanish speakers use them as a way to indicate how a word is pronounced (which is something that they already know). They learn (in general) to correctly pronounce a word long before they learn to write it.

Answer 2

Those little marks are called "accents" and they let the reader know how to pronounce a word.

For example, with the word información the accent tells us to stress the last o in the word.

Here’s a link to an article in the Reference section on how to use written accents in Spanish.

Answer 3

,susuali

Accent Marks and Pronounciation Stress

Span¡shD!ct.com has two Reference articles dealing with the meaning and significance of the "Tilde" accent marks that are placed above some of the Spanish letter characters. Here are links to those two articles:

Tilde Accent Marks, and

Kinds (Categories) of Stress (or syllable emphasis)

Our teacher, Paralee Whitmire created these in the hope they would help you to understand how the tilde accent marks affect word pronounciation.