How are accents used in Spanish?

In Spanish, accents (specifically acute accents, like `´`) are used to indicate stress and to differentiate between homophones. Here’s a more detailed explanation of their usage:

1. **Indicating Stress**:
- **Regular Stress**: In Spanish, words typically follow natural stress patterns:
- Words ending in a vowel, "n", or "s" are usually stressed on the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable, e.g., "casa" (house), "joven" (young), "lápices" (pencils).
- Words ending in other consonants are usually stressed on the last syllable, e.g., "comer" (to eat), "maíz" (corn).
- **Irregular Stress**: When the natural stress pattern is not followed, an accent mark is used to indicate the syllable that should be stressed. For example:
- "Café" (coffee) is stressed on the last syllable.
- "Árbol" (tree) is stressed on the first syllable.

2. **Differentiating Homophones**:
- Accents can also differentiate words that are spelled the same but have different meanings or grammatical functions.
- **"Él" (he) vs. "el" (the)**.
- **"Tú" (you, informal singular) vs. "tu" (your)**.
- **"Sí" (yes) vs. "si" (if)**.
- **"Más" (more) vs. "mas" (but)**.

3. **Question and Exclamation Words**:
- In direct and indirect questions and exclamations, certain words always have accents, regardless of their position in the sentence:
- **Qué** (what), **Cuál** (which), **Por qué** (why), **Quién** (who), **Cómo** (how), **Cuándo** (when), **Dónde** (where), **Cuánto** (how much/many).

### Examples

1. **Indicating Stress**:
- Regular: "helado" (ice cream), stress on "la."
- Irregular: "canción" (song), stress on "ción."

2. **Differentiating Homophones**:
- **Si** (if) vs. **sí** (yes).
- **Mi** (my) vs. **mí** (me).

3. **Question Words**:
- Direct: "¿Qué quieres?" (What do you want?)
- Indirect: "No sé qué quieres." (I don't know what you want.)

Understanding and applying accents correctly is important in Spanish to convey the correct meaning and pronunciation of words.