Digrafeja

Digrafeja is a linguistic term used to describe a digraph, a sequence of two letters that together represents a single phoneme or unit in a written language. The concept is central to the study of orthography and phonology, illustrating how languages encode sounds beyond the capacity of a single letter.

Two-letter sequences may reflect historical sound changes or loanword spellings and can vary by language. In many linguistic traditions, "digrafeja" is used interchangeably with "digraph" to refer to such two-letter graphemic units, though exact usage can differ among scholarly communities and writing systems.

Common examples include the English "sh" representing the /ʃ/ sound as in ship, the "ch" for /tʃ/ as in chair, and the initial "ph" in many loanwords representing /f/ as in photo. Other languages have their own digrafaeja, such as two-letter sequences that represent a single vowel sound or a consonant cluster treated as a single phoneme in spelling.

Digrafeja are distinct from individual graphemes, which are the smallest units of writing; a two-letter digrafeja may map to one phoneme or to a single linguistic unit. They are studied in fields such as descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, and typology to understand how writing systems encode speech.