The acute accent is used over e to indicate a stressed front close-mid vowel, as in perché "why, because".

In dictionaries, it is also used over o to indicate a stressed back close-mid vowel (azióne).

The close-mid vowels identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

Close-mid vowels and open-mid vowels ( and ) contrast only when they are stressed.

Also, it should be noted that the close-mid vowel /e/ only appears in a small number of words, and is probably a loan from surrounding languages.

That is, close-mid vowels, near-close vowels, and close vowels can all be considered high vowels.

Each of these vowels, apart from the close-mid vowel ur /ɵ/, has an equivalent nasal vowel.

Thus Amstetten Bavarian may be an example of a language that contrasts mid vowels with both open-mid and close-mid vowels.

In some languages, like Spanish and Romanian, the phonemic status and difference between open-mid and close-mid vowels was lost.

There is evidence that open-mid vowel and were originally separate phonemes from close-mid vowel and , but by the twentieth century the pairs merged.

The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel.

Finnish makes phonemic contrasts between long and short vowels, even in unstressed syllables, though long close-mid vowels are more common in unstressed syllables.

The IPA divides the vowel space into thirds, with the close-mid vowels such as or and the open-mid vowels such as or equidistant in formant space between open and close or .

The acute accent may be used on e and o to represent close-mid vowels when they are stressed in a position other than the default second-to-last syllable; this use of accents is generally mandatory only in the final syllable.