Letters in English orthography usually represent a particular sound ( phoneme). įurther information: Phonemic orthography On the other hand, it also adds to the discrepancy between the way English is written and spoken in any given location. As a result of this, many words are spelled the way that they were pronounced more than 600 years ago, instead of being spelled like they are pronounced in the 21st century.ĭespite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most recognised variations being British and American spelling, and its overall uniformity helps facilitate international communication. Most of the spelling conventions in Modern English were derived from the phonetic spelling of a variety of Middle English, and generally do not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late 15th century (such as the Great Vowel Shift). For example, the word ghost was previously spelled gast in English, until the Flemish spelling pattern was unintentionally substituted, and happened to be accepted.
This is partly due to the large number of words that have been borrowed from a large number of other languages throughout the history of English, without successful attempts at complete spelling reforms, and partly due to accidents of history, such as some of the earliest mass-produced English publications being typeset by highly trained, multilingual printing compositors, who occasionally used a spelling pattern more typical for another language. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell nearly every phoneme (sound), and most letters also have multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. This standardization began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. Like the orthography of most world languages, English orthography has a broad degree of standardization. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.Įnglish orthography is the system of writing conventions used to represent spoken English in written form that allows readers to connect spelling to sound to meaning.
For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
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