Can Uppercase Letters be Marked with an Accent?

One of the questions that Spanish teachers get asked in class is if the accent mark known in Spanish as the tilde is really necessary (the tilde shouldn’t be confused with the virgulilla [~] which is placed over the [n] to turn it into an eñe [ñ].

The importance of the tilde has already been justified and we all know that its use is fundamental in helping readers correctly read texts out loud without having to understand its content. 

We often find however in advertisements, names of establishments, reader boards, etc, an absence of the tilde over uppercase letters. If we were to write a word like MAYUSCULAS for example, we would be asking the reader to read it as /mayusCUlas/. Even now, as I write these words, spell check is reminding me when a word written in lowercase letters is spelled with a missing accent mark, but oh shame on the word processor! It doesn’t correct the word mayusculas here in uppercase (a word some word erroneously call a letra capital in Spanish).

 Uppercase letters should be marked with an accent in Spanish whenever necessary.

And since there’s nothing better than an example to make things clear, let’s take a look at what happened to the title of one of the journals in Spain that most takes care to uphold proper language use: El País. Written as I’ve just written it, an accent clearly must be placed over the i to mark the fact that the word isn’t to be read as a diphthong like baile, but rather with the a and the i pronounced as different syllables. During Spain’s delicate transition period which saw the country shift from a dictatorship to a democracy, there were much more important issues on the minds of Spaniards than spelling rules, and the title of the paper appeared like this:

Years later however, in 2007, a change occurred, and readers were treated to an elegant blue tilde over the title:

Now everything’s in order. MUCHÍSIMAS GRACIAS, in uppercase and marked with an accent, just the way it should be.