Most national and international languages have an establishedwriting system that has undergone substantial standardization, thus exhibiting lessdialect variation than the spoken language.[1][2] These processes can fossilize pronunciation patterns that are no longer routinely observed in speech (e.g.would andshould); they can also reflect deliberate efforts to introduce variability for the sake of national identity, as seen inNoah Webster's efforts to introduce easily noticeable differences betweenAmerican and British spelling (e.g.honor andhonour).
Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education, the workplace, and the state. Some nations have establishedlanguage academies in an attempt to regulate aspects of the national language, including its orthography—such as theAcadémie Française in France and theRoyal Spanish Academy in Spain. No such authority exists for most languages, including English. Some non-state organizations, such asnewspapers of record andacademic journals, choose greater orthographic homogeneity by enforcing a particularstyle guide or spelling standard such asOxford spelling.
The English wordorthography is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately fromAncient Greek:ὀρθός (orthós 'correct') andγράφειν (gráphein 'to write').[3]
Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters ofspelling, i.e. the correspondence between writtengraphemes and thephonemes found in speech.[4][5] Other elements that may be considered part of orthography includehyphenation,capitalization,word boundaries,emphasis, andpunctuation.[6] Thus,orthography describes or defines the symbols used in writing, and the conventions that regulate their use.
Mostnatural languages developed as oral languages andwriting systems have usually been crafted or adapted as ways of representing the spoken language. The rules for doing this tend to becomestandardized for a given language, leading to the development of an orthography that is generally considered "correct". Inlinguistics,orthography often refers to any method of writing a language without judgement as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention. The original sense of the word, though, implies a dichotomy of correct and incorrect, and the word is still most often used to refer specifically to a standardizedprescriptive manner of writing. A distinction is made betweenemic and etic viewpoints, with the emic approach taking account of perceptions of correctness among language users, and the etic approach being purely descriptive, considering only the empirical qualities of any system as used.
This page usesIPA notation for orthographic or other linguistic analysis. For the meaning of how⟨ ⟩,| |,/ /, and[ ]are used here, seethis page.
Orthographic units, such as letters of analphabet, are conceptualized asgraphemes. These are a type ofabstraction, analogous to thephonemes of spoken languages; different physical forms of written symbols are considered to represent the same grapheme if the differences between them are not significant for meaning. Thus, a grapheme can be regarded as an abstraction of a collection ofglyphs that are all functionally equivalent. For example, in written English (or other languages using theLatin alphabet), there are two different physical representations (glyphs) of thelowercase Latin lettera:⟨a⟩ and⟨ɑ⟩. Since the substitution of either of them for the other cannot change the meaning of a word, they are considered to beallographs of the same grapheme, which can be written|a|. Theitalic andboldface forms are also allographic.
Graphemes or sequences of them are sometimes placed between angle brackets, as in|b| or|back|. This distinguishes them from phonemic transcription, which is placed between slashes (/b/,/bæk/), and fromphonetic transcription, which is placed between square brackets ([b],[bæk]).
Thewriting systems on which orthographies are based can be divided into a number of types, depending on what type of unit each symbol serves to represent. The principal types arelogographic (with symbols representing words or morphemes),syllabic (with symbols representing syllables), andalphabetic (with symbols roughly representing phonemes). Many writing systems combine features of more than one of these types, and a number of detailed classifications have been proposed. Japanese is an example of a writing system that can be written using a combination of logographickanji characters and syllabichiragana andkatakana characters; as with many non-alphabetic languages, alphabeticromaji characters may also be used as needed.[7]
Orthographies that usealphabets andsyllabaries are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, andsyllables in the latter. In virtually all cases, this correspondence is not exact. Different languages' orthographies offer different degrees of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation. An orthography in which the correspondences between spelling and pronunciation are highly complex or inconsistent is called adeep orthography (or less formally, the language is said to haveirregular spelling). An orthography with relatively simple, consistent correspondences (i.e. morebijective, or one-to-one) between spelling and pronunciation is calledshallow (and the language hasregular spelling).[citation needed]
TheNavajo alphabet is a deep orthography.[8] The Navajo language is a complex language system that relies on relatively subtle phonetics, including distinct tones and nasalization. The script likewise exhibits complexities representing the language, which presents challenges for people trying to acquire literacy.
Spanish is an alphabet with shallow orthography; there is clear one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes.[9] Another is theHawaiian alphabet, which only includes eight vowel letters and five consonant letters, for a total of thirteen. This allows literacy to be acquired quickly compared to deeper orthographies.[10]
According to studies, children learn to read and write more quickly in shallow orthographies, such as Spanish, compared to deeper orthographies, like English. Orthographic mapping is the process of associating phonemes with graphemes. By establishing these strong connections, children can easily decode unfamiliar words with what they already know. Orthographic mapping also helps with vocabulary development and reading fluency. Although shallow orthography is easier to grasp, researchers have argued that deeper orthographies make it challenging for individuals withdyslexia to learn.[11]
An orthography based on a correspondence to phonemes may sometimes lack characters to represent all the phonemic distinctions in the language. This is called adefective orthography. An example in English is the lack of any indication ofstress.[citation needed] Another is thedigraph|th|, which represents two different phonemes (as inthen andthin) and replaced the old letters|ð| and|þ|. A more systematic example is that ofabjads like theArabic andHebrew alphabets, in which the short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader.
When an alphabet is borrowed from its original language for use with a new language—as has been done with theLatin alphabet for many languages, or Japanesekatakana for non-Japanese words—it often proves defective in representing the new language's phonemes. Sometimes this problem is addressed by the use of such devices as digraphs (such as|sh| and|ch| in English, where pairs of letters represent single sounds),diacritics (like thecaron on the letters|š| and|č|, which represent those same sounds inCzech), or the addition of completely new symbols (as some languages have introduced the letter|w| to the Latin alphabet) or of symbols from another alphabet, such as therune|þ| in Icelandic.
After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features. As pronunciation of letters changed over time, the diacritics were reduced to representing the stressed syllable. In Modern Greek typesetting, this system has been simplified to have only a single accent to indicate which syllable is stressed.[12]
^Seidenberg, Mark S. (1992). "Beyond Orthographic Depth in Reading: Equitable Division of Labor".Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning. Advances in Psychology. Vol. 94. pp. 85–118.doi:10.1016/S0166-4115(08)62790-9.ISBN978-0-444-89140-2.
^Donohue, Mark (2007), "Lexicography for Your Friends", in Siegel, Jeff; Lynch, John; Eades, Diana (eds.),Language Description, History and Development: Linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley, Creole Language Library, vol. 30, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, p. 396,doi:10.1075/cll.30,ISBN978-90-272-5252-4
^Carrillo, María Soledad; Alegría, Jesús; Marín, Javier (July 2013). "On the acquisition of some basic word spelling mechanisms in a deep (French) and a shallow (Spanish) system".Reading and Writing.26 (6):799–819.doi:10.1007/s11145-012-9391-6.ISSN0922-4777.
^Bulley, Michael (December 2011). "Spelling reform – a lesson from the Greeks: Learning from the Greeks about English spellings".English Today.27 (4):71–72.doi:10.1017/S0266078411000575.
Borgwaldt, Susanne R.; Joyce, Terry (2013),Typology of Writing Systems, Amsterdam: John Benjamins,ISBN978-90-272-0270-3
Condorelli, Marco; Rutkowska, Hanna, eds. (2023),The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Orthography, Cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics, Cambridge University Press,ISBN978-1-108-48731-3
Coulmas, Florian (2002) [1996],The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems (Repr. ed.), Malden, MA: Blackwell,ISBN978-0-631-19446-0
Sebba, Mark (2007),Spelling and society: the culture and politics of orthography around the world, Cambridge University Press,ISBN978-0-521-84845-9
Spolsky, Bernard, ed. (2012), "Literacy and Writing Reform",The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy, Cambridge handbooks in language and linguistics, Cambridge University Press,doi:10.1017/cbo9780511979026,ISBN978-0-511-97902-6
Coulmas, Florian; Guerini, Federica. "Literacy and Writing Reform". InSpolsky (2012), pp. 437–460.
Venezky, Richard L.; Trabasso, Tom (2005),From orthography to pedagogy: essays in honor of Richard L. Venezky, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum,ISBN0-8058-5089-9
