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1 Types of alphabets

Among alphabets, one may distinguish abjads, which only record consonants; alphabets which record consonants and vowels separately, called simply alphabets and first developed by the Greeks; and abugidas, in which the vowels are indicated by systematic modification of the form of the consonants.

The smallest known alphabet is the Rotokas alphabet, which contains only 11 letters. The largest known actual alphabet (having separate single letters for separate sounds i.e. not an abugida) is Armenian with 39 letters. (Syllabaries typically include many more symbols.)

2 Spelling

Each language may establish certain general rules that govern the association between letters and phonemes, but, depending on the language, these rules may or may not be consistently followed. In a perfectly phonological alphabet, the phonemes and letters would correspond perfectly in two directions: a writer could predict the spelling of a word given its pronunciation, and a speaker could predict the pronunciation of a word given its spelling. However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.

Languages may fail to achieve a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds in any of several ways:

• A language may represent a given phoneme with a combination of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphA digraph or bigraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound. This is often, but not necessarily, a sound (or more precisely a phoneme) which cannot be expressed using a single letter in the alphabet used for writing. Sometimes, when digraphs do nots and three-letter groups are called trigraphA trigraph is a group of three letters used to represent a single sound. For example, in the word schilling, "sch" represents the 'sh' sound. In the word "night", "igh" represents the vowel (a diphthong). Other examples are "beautiful" (eau), "adieu" (ieus.
• A language may represent the same phoneme with two different letters or combinations of letters.
• A language may spell some words with unpronounced letters that exist for historical or other reasons.
• Pronunciation of individual words may change according to the presence of surrounding words in a sentence.
• Different dialects of a language may pronounce different phonemes for the same word.

National languages generally elect to address the problem of dialects by simply associating the alphabet with the national standard. However, with international languages with wide variations in its dialects, such as EnglishThe English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the mil, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.

Some national languages like FinnishFinnish is spoken by the majority in Finland and by Ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It is one of two official languages of Finland. Finnish is a member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is an agglutinative language which modifies the forms of both n and SpanishThis article is about the international language known as Spanish. For other languages spoken in Spain see Languages of Spain Spanish is an Iberian Romance language, and the third or fourth most spoken language in the world. It is spoken as a first langua have a very regular spelling system with close to a one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes. The Italian languageItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 70 million people, most of whom live in Italy. Standard Italian is based on Tuscan dialects and is somewhat intermediate between the languages of Southern Italy and the Gallo-Romance languages of the North. has no verb corresponding to 'spell:' scriversi ('is written') suffices, because a correct pronunciation exactly corresponds to a correct orthographyThe orthography of a language is the set of rules of how to write correctly in the language. The term is derived from Greek omicron;ρθ&omicron ortho ("correct") and gamma;ραφο&sigmaf graphos ("that writes") and, in today's. In standard Spanish, it is possible to predict the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently represented. FrenchFrench le francais la langue francaise is one of the most important Romance languages, outnumbered only by Spanish and Portuguese. French is the 11th most spoken language in the world, spoken by about 77 million people (called Francophones) as a mother to, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy. At the other extreme, however, are languages such as English, where the spelling of many words simply has to be memorized as they do not correspond to sounds in a consistent way, because the Great Vowel Shift in English occurred after orthography was established. However, even English has general rules that predict pronunciation from spelling, and these rules are successful a majority of the time.

The sounds of speech of all languages of the world can be written by a rather small universal phonetic alphabet. A standard for this is the International Phonetic Alphabet.