Acute

Acute, in linguistics, refers to the diacritic symbol ´ above a character (e.g. á). It has a variety of meanings depending on the language. Usually it is placed above vowels and indicates stress, or open / closed pronunciation, or long pronunciation.

The use of the acute (see also hacek) to denote long pronunciation of Latin characters was introduced by Jan Hus in the 15th century into the Czech language and today it is also used by the Slovaks, Slovenians, Croatians, Upper Lusatian and Lower Lusatian Sorbs, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians, and partly by the Poles (though the Polish kreska is traditionally more nearly vertical than the acute). It is also often used for international transliteration.