Stress in Spanish

Stress in Spanish is functional: to change the placement of stress changes the meaning of a sentence or phrase: for example, célebre ('famous'), celebre ('[that] he/she celebrates'), and celebré ('I celebrated') contrast only by stress. There is some minor variance among Spanish dialects; a speaker of Rioplatense Spanish will pronounce boina ('beret') as [ˈbojna], but a speaker of Colombian Spanish will pronounce it as [boˈina] and spell it as boína.[1]