A phonemic orthography is a writing system where the written graphemes correspond to phonemes, the spoken sounds of the language. These are sometimes termed true alphabets, but other writing systems, like syllabaries, can be phonemic as well. Writing systems of the world today. ... A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent (or approximate) syllables, which make up words. ...

Languages with a good grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence include Basque, Sanskrit, Serbian and Finnish. Many constructed languages such as Esperanto and Lojban also have phonemic orthographies. Basque (native name: Euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ... The Sanskrit language (Skt. ... Serbian (српски језик; srpski jezik) is one of the standard versions of the Shtokavian dialect, used primarily in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and by Serbs everywhere. ... Esperanto flag Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language. ... Lojban (IPA , official full name Lojban: a realization of Loglan) is a syntactically unambiguous, predicate logic-based constructed language which was created by the Logical Language Group in 1987 as a realization of Loglan, with the intent to make the language more complete, usable, and freely available. ...

Phonetic alphabets such as International Phonetic Alphabet aim to describe pronunciation in a standard, phonemic, form. They are often used to solve ambiguities in the spelling of written language. They may also be used to write languages with no previous written form. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words see here. ...

As dialects of the English language vary significantly, it would be difficult to create a phonemic orthography that encompassed all of them. However, it is fairly easy to create one based on a standard dialect such as Received Pronunciation. This would, however, exclude certain sound differences found in other dialects, such as the bad-lad split in Australian English. With time, pronunciations change and thus in order to maintain a phonemic orthography such a system would need periodic updating in order to not become out of date, as has happened to English and French. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... The bad-lad split is a phonemic split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme into a short and a long . ... Australian English (AuE) is the form of the English language used in Australia. ...

Difference with phonetic orthographies

Note that phonemic orthographies are different from phonetic orthographies; whereas in a phonemic orthography, allophones will be represented by the same grapheme, a phonetic orthography demands, by its very nature, that the phonetically distinct allophones be written as such. To use an example from English, the "t" sound in the words "table" and "cat" would, in a phonemic orthography, be written with the same character; however, a phonetic orthography would make a distinction between the aspirated "t" in "table", the flap in "butter", the unaspirated "t" in "stop" and the glottalized "t" in "cat" (not all these allophones exist in all English dialects). In other words, a phonemic orthography represents phonemes, the sounds distinguished by speakers of the language and used to differentiate words (e.g. "fat" vs "vat"). In phonetics, an allophone is one of several similar phones that belong to the same phoneme. ... In typography, a grapheme is the atomic unit in written language. ... In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies the release of some obstruents. ... The alveolar tap/flap is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. ... In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies the release of some stop consonants. ... See also Glottalic consonant Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. ... A dialect (from the Greek word διάλεκτος, dialektos) is a variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. ...

A phonetic orthography represents phones, the sounds humans are capable of producing, many of which will often be grouped together as a single phoneme in any given natural language, the groupings being varied across languages. English, for example, does not distinguish aspirated/unaspirated consonants, but other languages, like Bengali and Hindi, do. Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা, IPA: ) is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from Prakrit, Pāli and Sanskrit. ... Hindi (हिन्दी) is a language spoken mainly in North and Central India. ...

See also

• Pronunciation spelling