English Translation
That is the house where he lives.
This shouldn’t have an accent right?
Not in contemporary writing, right. The accent was the norm in my textbooks when I first learnt the language, though.
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In Spanish, some pronouns and adverbs used to have accents when they were used in a specific way to distinguish them from their counterparts, but the Real Academia Española (the Royal Spanish Academy, which sets the standards for the Spanish language) eliminated these distinctions in 2010.
Before the rule change, “éste, ése, aquél” (and the female and neutral equivalents) had accents when they functioned as pronouns. The unaccented versions “este, ese, aquel” were used as demonstrative adjectives.
With the new rules, the accent is no longer necessary unless there’s a risk of ambiguity. In most cases, context makes the meaning clear, so the accent is rarely used. In your sentence, there’s no ambiguity, so no accent is needed.
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