The
orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific
writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example for
Kurdish, there can be more than one orthography.
Orthography is derived from
Greek ????? orthós ("correct") and
???fe?? gráphein ("to write"). Orthography is distinct from
typography.
While "orthography" colloquially is often used synonymously with spelling, spelling is only part of orthography. Other elements of the field of orthography are hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks and punctuation. Orthography describes or defines the set of symbols (graphemes and diacritics) used, and the rules about how to write these symbols.
An orthography may be described as "efficient" if it has one grapheme per phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa. An orthography may also have varying degrees of efficiency for reading or writing. For example, diverse letter, digraph, and diacritic shapes contribute to diverse word shapes, which aid fluent reading, while heavy use of apostrophes or diacritics makes writing slow, and the use of symbols not found on standard keyboards makes computer or cell phone input awkward.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography that has a dedicated symbol or sequence of symbols for each phoneme (distinctive speech sound) and vice versa, that is, graphemes and phonemes are bijective functions of one another. Spanish and Italian are very close to being phonemic, and English is among the least phonemic.
