Bokstavparet

Bokstavparet is a term used in Scandinavian linguistics and orthography to describe a pair of letters that are analyzed or treated as a unit within a language’s writing system. The concept encompasses digraphs—two letters that together represent a single sound or a distinct phoneme—as well as letter combinations that influence spelling, sorting, or pronunciation.

Common purposes of studying bokstavparet include phonological analysis (grapheme-phoneme correspondence), orthographic reform, and language education. In many languages, certain bokstavpar correspond to one sound. The precise interpretation of a bokstavparet can vary by language: in some alphabets, digraphs are treated as separate letters for purposes of alphabetization.

Beyond phonology, bokstavparet is relevant in natural language processing and computational linguistics. Tokenization can treat digraphs as single units or as two characters depending on the language, and grapheme-to-phoneme rules may map a bokstavpar to a single phoneme.

In cryptography, the term is analogous to bigrams, which are pairs of letters used in digraphic ciphers to encode text.

Examples of bokstavpar in various languages include common digraphs such as “th,” “sh,” or “ng” in English, “ch” in German, or language-specific pairs like “kj” or “ng” in Nordic languages. However, not all two-letter sequences are treated as bokstavpar; some may simply be adjacent letters with separate sounds.

See also: digraph, grapheme, alphabetization, ligature, bigram.