Orthographies

Correspondence with pronunciation

Orthographies that use alphabets and syllabaries are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and syllables 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 a deep orthography (or less formally, the language is said to have irregular spelling). An orthography with relatively simple, consistent correspondences (i.e. more bijective, or one-to-one) between spelling and pronunciation is called shallow (and the language has regular spelling).