Punctuation and Uses of Written Accent

In general, Spanish punctuation marks are used the same way as in English with few exceptions.

Inverted Interrogation & Exclamation Marks
Yes/No Questions in Spanish
Capitalization in Spanish
Uses of the Written Accent in Spanish
Abbreviations in Spanish
Level I – Basic

Inverted Interrogation & Exclamation Marks

One notable exception in Spanish is the following:

Interrogation and exclamation marks are used in Spanish both at the beginning and at the end of the question or exclamation with the inverted sign at the beginning, such as “¿Cómo estás?” (How are you?) and “¡Qué lástima!” (What a pity!).

Notice that this rule is not always enforced in many countries except in formal and legal documents.

Yes/No Questions in Spanish

Punctuation is also important to distinguish a question from a statement. For instance, the sentence “El café está caliente” (The coffee is hot) is a statement. Adding question marks to the beginning and end of the sentence “¿El café está caliente?”makes it a question. This is how questions are formed in Spanish. Unlike in English, we do not use any auxiliary or reorder the sentence to form a question. Saying “¿Está el café caliente?”is grammatically incorrect.

Capitalization in Spanish

The words are capitalized in cases almost identical to those in English, with a few notable exceptions that are not capitalized in Spanish, mainly:

Adjectives of nationality and languages, e.g., “italiano” (Italian), “canadiense” (Canadian), “español” (Spanish).
Days and months, e.g., “martes” (Tuesday), “enero” (January), “julio” (July).

It is also worth noting that all alphabet letters are feminine in Spanish. For example, when referring to a letter in Spanish, one may say: la “a” in “padre” (the “a” in “father”), referring to the letter “a” using the feminine article “la.” We will learn more about masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives in Level II, Lesson 1.

Uses of the Written Accent in Spanish

In addition to marking the exceptions to the syllable stress rules, the written acute accent in Spanish ( ´ ) has the following two uses:

To distinguish between the meaning of words that would otherwise be written in the same manner. For example, “el” is the masculine definite article “the,” whereas “él” is the personal pronoun “he,” “mas” (formal use only) is a conjunction meaning “but,” whereas “más” means “more.”
To distinguish between interrogative and relative pronouns, e.g., “¿Dónde vives?” (Where do you live?) vs. “No hay transporte donde vivo” (There is no transportation where I live). Notice that the interrogative pronoun “dónde” (where) has an accent on the vowel of the first syllable in the first example. The same concept applies to some other interrogative pronouns, such as “¿Quién?” (who?), “¿Qué?” (what?), “¿Cuál?” (which?), “¿Dónde?” (where?).

Abbreviations in Spanish

The concepts behind the formation of acronyms and abbreviations in Spanish are very similar to those in English. One notable exception is the doubling of the letters in the abbreviation of some plural nouns, e.g., “Estados Unidos” (United States) is abbreviated as “EE. UU.” For more detail on this rule and a list of common abbreviations in Spanish, interested readers can refer to the Acronyms & Abbreviation Sheet in the Resources page of this website.

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