Inlinguistics, agrapheme is the smallest functional unit of awriting system.[1]The wordgrapheme is derived fromAncient Greekgráphō ('write'), and the suffix-eme by analogy withphoneme and otheremic units. The study of graphemes is calledgraphemics. The concept of graphemes is abstract and similar to the notion incomputing of acharacter. By comparison, a specific shape that represents any particular grapheme in a giventypeface is called aglyph.
In the so-calledreferential conception, graphemes are interpreted as the smallest units of writing that correspond with sounds (more accuratelyphonemes). In this concept, thesh in the written English wordshake would be a grapheme because it represents the phoneme/ʃ/. This referential concept is linked to thedependency hypothesis that claims that writing merely depicts speech.
By contrast, theanalogical concept defines graphemes analogously to phonemes, i.e. via writtenminimal pairs such asshake vs.snake. In this example,h andn are graphemes because they distinguish two words. This analogical concept is associated with the autonomy hypothesis which holds that writing is a system in its own right and should be studied independently from speech. Both concepts have weaknesses.[3]
Some models adhere to both concepts simultaneously by including two individual units,[4] which are given names such asgraphemic grapheme for the grapheme according to the analogical conception (h inshake), andphonological-fit grapheme for the grapheme according to the referential concept (sh inshake).[5]
In newer concepts, in which the grapheme is interpretedsemiotically as a dyadiclinguistic sign,[6] it is defined as a minimal unit of writing that is both lexically distinctive and corresponds with a linguistic unit (phoneme,syllable, ormorpheme).[7]
Graphemes are often notated withinangle brackets: e.g.⟨a⟩.[8] This is analogous to the slash notation/a/ used forphonemes. Analogous to thesquare bracket notation[a] used forphones,glyphs are sometimes denoted with vertical lines, e.g.|ɑ|.[9]
In the same way that thesurface forms ofphonemes are speech sounds orphones (and different phones representing the same phoneme are calledallophones), the surface forms of graphemes areglyphs (sometimesgraphs), namely concrete written representations of symbols (and different glyphs representing the same grapheme are calledallographs).
Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as anabstraction of a collection of glyphs that are all functionally equivalent.
For example, in written English (or other languages using theLatin alphabet), there are two different physical representations of thelowercase Latin letter "a": "a" and "ɑ". Since, however, the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to be allographs of the same grapheme, which can be written⟨a⟩. Similarly, the grapheme corresponding to "Arabic numeral zero" has a unique semantic identity and Unicode valueU+0030 but exhibits variation in the form ofslashed zero. Italic and bold face forms are also allographic, as is the variation seen inserif (as inTimes New Roman) versussans-serif (as inHelvetica) forms.
There is some disagreement as to whether capital and lower case letters are allographs or distinct graphemes. Capitals are generally found in certain triggering contexts that do not change the meaning of a word: a proper name, for example, or at the beginning of a sentence, or all caps in a newspaper headline. In other contexts, capitalization can determine meaning: compare, for examplePolish andpolish: the former is a language, the latter is for shining shoes.
Some linguists considerdigraphs like the⟨sh⟩ inship to be distinct graphemes, but these are generally analyzed as sequences of graphemes. Non-stylisticligatures, however, such as⟨æ⟩, are distinct graphemes, as are various letters with distinctivediacritics, such as⟨ç⟩.
Identical glyphs may not always represent the same grapheme. For example, the three letters⟨A⟩,⟨А⟩ and⟨Α⟩ appear identical but each has a different meaning: in order, they are the Latin letterA, the Cyrillic letterAzǔ/Азъ and the Greek letterAlpha. Each has its owncode point in Unicode:U+0041ALATIN CAPITAL LETTER A,U+0410АCYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER A andU+0391ΑGREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA.
As mentioned in the previous section, in languages that usealphabetic writing systems, many of the graphemes stand in principle for thephonemes (significant sounds) of the language. In practice, however, theorthographies of such languages entail at least a certain amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by amultigraph (sequence of more than one grapheme), as thedigraphsh represents a single sound in English (and sometimes a single grapheme may represent more than one phoneme, as with the Russian letterя or the Spanish c). Some graphemes may not represent any sound at all (like theb in Englishdebt or theh in all Spanish words containing the said letter), and often the rules of correspondence between graphemes and phonemes become complex or irregular, particularly as a result of historicalsound changes that are not necessarily reflected in spelling. "Shallow" orthographies such as those of standardSpanish andFinnish have relatively regular (though not always one-to-one) correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, while those of French and English have much less regular correspondence, and are known asdeep orthographies.
Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, not as graphemes in their own right. However, in some languages a multigraph may be treated as a single unit for the purposes ofcollation; for example, in aCzech dictionary, the section for words that start with⟨ch⟩ comes after that for⟨h⟩.[11] For more examples, seeAlphabetical order § Language-specific conventions.
^Coulmas, F. (1996), The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell, p. 174
^Kohrt, M. (1986), The term 'grapheme' in the history and theory of linguistics. In G. Augst (Ed.),New trends in graphemics and orthography. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 80–96.doi:10.1515/9783110867329.80
^Lockwood, D. G. (2001), Phoneme and grapheme: How parallel can they be?LACUS Forum 27, 307–316.
^Rezec, O. (2013), Ein differenzierteres Strukturmodell des deutschen Schriftsystems.Linguistische Berichte 234, pp. 227–254.
^Herrick, E. M. (1994), Of course a structural graphemics is possible!LACUS Forum 21, pp. 413–424.
^Fedorova, L. (2013), The development of graphic representation in abugida writing: The akshara’s grammar.Lingua Posnaniensis 55:2, pp. 49–66.doi:10.2478/linpo-2013-0013
^The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, second edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 196
^Meletis, Dimitrios; Dürscheid, Christa (2022).Writing Systems and Their Use: An Overview of Grapholinguistics. De Gruyter Mouton. p. 64.ISBN978-3-110-75777-4.
^Joyce, T. (2011), The significance of the morphographic principle for the classification of writing systems,Written Language and Literacy 14:1, pp. 58–81.doi:10.1075/wll.14.1.04joy
