Phoneme - Correspondence Between Letters and Phonemes

Correspondence Between Letters and Phonemes

Phonemes are considered to be the basis for alphabetic writing systems. In such systems the written symbols (graphemes) represent, in principle, the phonemes of the language being written. However, because changes in the spoken language are often not accompanied by changes in the established orthography (as well as other reasons, including dialect differences, the effects of morphophonology on orthography, and the use of foreign spellings for some loanwords), the correspondence between spelling and pronunciation in a given language may be highly distorted; this is the case with English, for example. (Occasionally, though, such discrepancies are reduced through the establishment of spelling pronunciations.)

The correspondence between symbols and phonemes in alphabetic writing systems is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence. A phoneme might be represented by a combination of two or more letters (digraph, trigraph, etc.), like in English or in German (both representing phonemes /ʃ/). Also a single letter may represent two phonemes, as the Russian letter я in some positions. There may also exist spelling/pronunciation rules (such as those for the pronunciation of in Italian) that further complicate the correspondence of letters to phonemes, although they need not affect the ability to predict the pronunciation from the spelling and vice versa, provided the rules are known.