First, you must remember that words are divided into three categories regarding stress placement:

• Oxytones (stress falls on the last syllable), such as café (coffee);

• Paroxytones (stress falls on the 2nd-to-last syllable), such as carro (car);

• Proparoxytones (stress falls on the antepenult syllable), such as anêmona (anemone).

 

Second, words may get one of the following accent marks:

• Acute accent (´), placed over vowels a, e, i, o and u;

• Circumflex accent (^), placed over vowels a, e and o.

 

Other diacritics in the language:

• Grave accent (`), placed over vowel a, is used exclusively to indicate crasis, not word stress;

• Tilde (~), placed over vowels a and o, is used to indicate vowel nasalization and may also indicate word stress (overlapping function);

• Cedilla (ç), placed under consonant c, is used to indicated that the letter c should be pronounced as the s in the English word sand;

• Dieresis (¨), placed over vowel u, is used to indicate that the letter u should be clearly pronounced in the strings gu and qu, such as in pingüim (penguin) and eqüestre (equestrian).

 

Guidelines

1. The stress falls on the last syllable of words ending in  -i, -is, -u, -us or in the  consonants -l, -r or -z:

 

consonants
-l	Brasil (Brazil), canil (kennel)
-r	lazer (leisure), prazer (pleasure)
-z	nariz (nose), matriz (matrix)

 

2. The stress falls on the penultimate syllable of words ending in -a, -as, -e, -es, -e, -o, -os, em, ens:

-a	-as	-e	-es	-o	-os	-em	-ens
mala (bag)	plantas (plants)	leme (rudder)	morte (death)	ouro (gold)	muros (walls)	homem (man)	homens (men)

 

All words that break the rules above mentioned must carry an accent mark to indicate syllable stress.

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