When QUE is accentuated in Spanish

When it comes to writing in Spanish, we often doubt about to stress or not the pronoun QUE. Not surprisingly, it is one of the spelling issues that causes the most problems when writing a text in Spanish. Thus, it is normal that we ask ourselves if "what" should always be stressed when it comes to interrogative sentences or exclamatory, or if there is any difference between two sentences such as "tell me what you think" or "tell me what you think wrong". To solve all these questions you should continue reading this article by a PROFESSOR where we give you the necessary keys to know how to distinguish when QUE is accentuated in Spanish.

One of the main problems when it comes to accentuating the relative pronoun "that" lies in the fact that there are also different syntactic contexts in which this word does not have an accent, which can lead to situations of doubt and confusion. To avoid this, we are going to briefly outline some of the contexts in which "que" should not be accentuated in Spanish:

• When your role is to relative pronoun:I need the book I lent you last week; The day that I want, my life will make sense.
• When it performs the syntactic function of nexus or conjunction: I would think twice before acting like this; I don't want you to tell me what to do.

In the above contexts, the word "that" is never accentuated since it is an unstressed word, unlike the different types of "what" that we are going to see next. The tilde, as we have studied in previous lessons, is used to differentiate between stressed or unstressed words that have the same morphological formation.

If we have doubts when choosing whether or not to accentuate the "what" we can do the following: try to enunciate the sentence aloud and thus verify that the "what" of an interrogative or exclamatory phrase is tonic, and therefore, we will have to pronounce it with a punch of voice greater than the unstressed "that", which functions as a nexus prayer.

Besides, we can also try to replace the pronoun "what" with something like "what do you mean" or "What are you talking about", and so we can verify that, as it is a question, it is a tonic word and, therefore, we must accentuate it graphically.

Once we have seen the syntactic contexts in which we should not put the check mark in "what", now we are going to study those in which yes it is necessary to accentuate "what":

• When it starts direct interrogative sentences (written between question marks?) or direct exclamatory sentences (always written between exclamation marks!): What a great time we had at the party last night!; How did your last math test go?; What a long time we had not seen each other!; How good I see you!; What day is today?; What time do we meet?
• When it works like neutral relative pronoun in sentences like Look how well he dances, I don't know what you think of Almodóvar's last film, We don't know what we're going to eat today; He told me that he didn't have to read.
• When acquires the functions of a nounIn other words, it is substantiated in such a way that it fulfills all the characteristics of a noun, such as admitting a determining article preceding the name: The important thing is not the what of the question but the how and where; I don't care exactly what they will say in town; What do I know if Jaime's car is cheaper than the one of yours; I have I don't know what in my stomach that has been hurting me all afternoon.

These are the three syntactic contexts in which the term "what" must always be accentuated in Spanish, in order to write correctly and not make spelling mistakes in our language. Thus, in this way, the tilde serves us in this case to differentiate a tonic word such as "what", an interrogative or exclamatory pronoun, from the relative pronoun or conjunction "what".

We hope this article has been useful for you and that you have learned when WHAT is accentuated in Spanish.