Understanding that there is a direct relationship between letters and sounds enables an emergent reader to decode the pronunciation of an unknown written word and associate it with a known spoken word.

Learning the connection between written letters and spoken sounds has been viewed as a critical heuristic to word identification for decades. See also: Phonics, Reading, Synthetic phonics, and Whole Language There are several reasons for this, including: first, the alphabet has 26 letters, but the English language has 40 sounds that must be reflected in word spellings second, English spelling began to be standardized in the 15th century, and most spellings have not been revised to reflect the long-term changes in pronunciation that are typical for all languages and third, English frequently adopts foreign words without changing the spelling of those words. In English the spelling system is more complex and varies considerably in the degree to which it follows uniform patterns. The spelling systems for some languages, such as Spanish or Italian, are relatively simple because they adhere closely to the ideal one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them. On the other hand, one symbol, such as the digraph th, can represent more than one phoneme: voiceless interdental /θ/ as in thin, voiced interdental /ð/ as in this, simple /t/ as in Thomas, or even the consonant cluster /tθ/ as in eighth. For example, the digraph ee almost always represents /i/ ( feed), but in many varieties of English the same sound can also be represented by a single e ( be), the letter y ( fifty), by i ( graffiti) or the digraphs ie ( field), ei ( deceit), ea ( feat), ey ( key), eo ( people), oe ( amoeba), ae ( aeon), is ( debris), it ( esprit), ui ( mosquito) or these letter patterns: ee-e ( cheese), ea-e ( leave), i-e ( ravine), e-e ( grebe), ea-ue ( league), ei-e ( deceive), ie-e ( believe), i-ue ( antique), eip ( receipt). Spelling patterns usually follow certain conventions but nearly every sound can be legitimately spelled with different letters or letter combinations. Korean was formerly written partially with Chinese characters, but is now written in the fully alphabetic Hangul system, in which the letters are not written linearly, but arranged in syllabic blocks which resemble Chinese characters.Įnglish orthography is based on the alphabetic principle, but the acquisition of sounds and spellings from a variety of languages and differential sound change within English have left Modern English spelling patterns confusing. The alphabetic principle does not underlie logographic writing systems like Chinese or syllabic writing systems such as Japanese kana. The alphabetic principle is closely tied to phonics, as it is the systematic relationship between spoken words and their visual representation (letters). On the other hand, French and English have a strong difference between sounds and symbols.

Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic, Latin, Vedic, and Sanskrit ( Devanāgarī-an abugida see Vyakarana). The best cases have a straightforward spelling system, enabling a writer to predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation and similarly enabling a reader to predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Serbo-Croatian (arguably, an example of perfect phonemic orthography), Macedonian, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Esperanto. Īlphabetic writing systems that use an (in principle) almost perfectly phonemic orthography have a single letter (or digraph or, occasionally, trigraph) for each individual phoneme and a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letters that represent them, although predictable allophonic alternation is normally not shown. In the education field, it is known as the alphabetic code. The alphabetic principle is the foundation of any alphabetic writing system (such as the English variety of the Roman alphabet, one of the more common types of writing systems in use today). JSTOR ( July 2007) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Īccording to the alphabetic principle, letters and combinations of letters are the symbols used to represent the speech sounds of a language based on systematic and predictable relationships between written letters, symbols, and spoken words.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.įind sources: 'Alphabetic principle' – news

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.