It’s Professor Dave, let’s learn how to accent Italian words.
When learning a foreign language, common challenges include learning which syllables in a word
to emphasize, or stress, as well as deciphering the meaning of certain accent marks.
Italian doesn’t use regular acute and grave accents like French does, but accent marks
are sometimes placed on the last syllable in a word to instruct emphasis on that syllable.
The sound of the syllable doesn’t change, the accent simply shows where the word receives
the stress.
We can see this in words like caffe` and citta`.
These words are called tronche, or ossitone.
The past and future tenses regularly use words like this, as with andro`, parlo`, or scrivera`.
But we will get to the grammar later.
Most words don’t have any accent marks, and with especially long words, this can make
it a little difficult to know which syllable to stress.
The general rule of thumb is that Italian words normally receive an accent on the penultimate,
or second to last syllable.
So it’s not scuoLA, it’s scuOla.
It’s not SCIUpato, it’s sciuPAto.
But this rule has many exceptions, and to complicate matters further, there are words
that take on different meanings simply by stressing one syllable over another.
Here are some examples.
Fortunately, this doesn’t happen with every word, and most of the time it’s relatively
easy to guess where the stress goes.
Here are some general rules for assigning emphasis.
Italian words that receive the stress on the penultimate, or next-to-last syllable, are
called piane.
This includes the majority of Italian words.
When the stress falls on the syllable before that, the third-to-last, these words
are called sdrucciole.
If the stress falls even one syllable before that, on the fourth-to-last, these words are
called bisdrucciole.
These include verbs or combinations of verbs and pronouns, like visitano, or raccontamelo.
And that’s all we need to know about Italian phonetics.