Á

Latin letter A with acute

Á, á (a-acute) is a letter of the Chinese (Pinyin), Blackfoot, Czech, Dutch, Faroese, Galician, Hungarian, Icelandic, Irish, Kazakh, Lakota, Navajo, Occitan, Portuguese, Sámi, Slovak, Spanish, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Western Apache languages as a variant of the letter a. It is sometimes confused with à; e.g. "5 pommes á $1", which is supposed to be written as "5 pommes à $1" (meaning "5 apples at 1 dollar each" in French).

Usage in various languages

Chinese

In Chinese pinyin á is the yángpíng tone (陽平/阳平 "high-rising tone") of "a".

Dutch

In Dutch, the Á is used to put emphasis on an "a", either in a long "a" form like in háár ("hair"), or in a short form like in kán (the verb "can").

Irish

In Irish, á is called a fada ("long a"), pronounced [aː] and appears in words such as slán ("goodbye"). It is the only diacritic used in Modern Irish, since the decline of the dot above many letters in the Irish language. Fada is only used on vowel letters i.e. á, é, í, ó, ú. It symbolises a lengthening of the vowel.

Czech, Hungarian, and Slovak

Á is the 2nd letter of the Czech, Hungarian and Slovak languages and represents the sound /aː/.

Faroese

Á is the 2nd letter of the Faroese alphabet and represents /ɔ/ or /ɔaː/.

Icelandic

Á is the second letter of the Icelandic alphabet and represents /au̯/ (as in "ow").

Kazakh

See also: Kazakh_alphabets § Latin_script

In the 2018 amends of Kazakh alphabet list, Á is defined as the second letter and represents /æ/. It has been replaced by Ä ä in the 2019 amends, and matches Cyrillic alphabet Ә, 2017 version Aʼ and Arabic ٵ.

Portuguese

In Portuguese, á is used to mark a stressed /a/ in words whose stressed syllable is in an abnormal location within the word, as in lá (there) and rápido (rapid, fast). If the location of the stressed syllable is predictable, the acute accent is not used. Á /a/ contrasts with â, pronounced /ɐ/.

Scottish Gaelic

Á was once used in Scottish, but has now been largely superseded by à. It can still be seen in certain writings, but it is no longer used in standard orthography.

Spanish

In Spanish, á is an accented letter, pronounced just the way a is. Both á and a sound like /a/. The accent indicates the stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong or to avoid what would otherwise be homonyms, although this does not happen with á, because a is a strong vowel and usually does not become a semivowel in a diphthong. See Diacritic and Acute accent for more details.

Vietnamese

In the Vietnamese alphabet, á is the sắc tone (high-rising tone) of a.

Welsh

In Welsh, word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) vowel is through the use of the acute accent. The acute accent on a is often found in verbal nouns and borrowed words, for example, casáu [kaˈsaɨ̯, kaˈsai̯ ] "to hate", caniatáu [kanjaˈtaɨ̯, kanjaˈtai̯] "to allow", carafán [karaˈvan] "caravan".

Character mappings

Character information

Preview	Á		á
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE		LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	193	U+00C1	225	U+00E1
UTF-8	195 129	C3 81	195 161	C3 A1
Numeric character reference	Á	Á	á	á
Named character reference	Á		á
EBCDIC family	101	65	69	45
ISO 8859-1/2/3/4/9/10/14/15/16	193	C1	225	E1

See also

• Acute accent
• À