Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
acute accent [Lat. acer ‘sharp’]
1 Superscript diacritic serving several purposes. It indicates length in Czech, Hungarian, and Old Icelandic (e.g. á for [a:]). In modern Icelandic it is used as a transcription of the sounds corresponding to the old long vowels, e.g. á for [aυ]. In French a distinction is drawn between é for [e] and è for [ε]. In Spanish the acute accent is used to mark syllable stress as, for example, in filosófico (‘philosophic’) and to distinguish graphemically between homonyms, cf. qué (‘what’) vs que (‘that’); similarly, some Russian texts use the acute accent for marking syllable stress. The acute accent is also used to mark tones as, for example, the long rising tone in Serbo-Croatian and rising tone in the Latinized Pīnyīn writing system of Chinese. Examples of other uses: in Polish: ń, ś, ź for 
, and 
respectively; in Dutch for word stress x staat vóór y (‘x comes before y’); in Greenlandic spelling, acute accent on a vowel indicates that the following consonant is long. (
also graphemics, writing)
2 accent2
3 In comparative linguistics, term for a stress of two morae ( mora, law of three morae).
4 grave vs acute
5 As a distinctive feature grave vs acute1
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