Grafies

Grafies are the basic written signs of a language’s writing system. In linguistic and palaeographic usage, a grafie (also called grafema in some traditions) is the smallest unit of writing that can distinguish meaning, roughly corresponding to what many scholars call a grapheme. Grafies can be letters, numerals, diacritics, or other marks that encode a segment of sound or meaning. They are distinguished from glyphs in that grafies refer to the abstract unit, while a glyph is a particular visual shape of that unit, which can vary by font or handwriting. Some grafies pair with allographs: two or more graphical variants that represent the same grafeme, such as the printed 'a' and the handwritten 'a' depending on style.

In practice, grafies include individual letters of an alphabet (for example a, b, c), digraphs or trigraphs considered as single grafies in some analyses (such as historically 'ch' in Spanish or the English 'ng' in some orthographies), and diacritics that modify base grafies (é, ü, ñ). The study of grafies spans orthography (the conventional spelling system), typography (the design and appearance of grafies), and paleography (the historical forms and development of grafies).

The term is most commonly used in linguistic and technical contexts to discuss how writing systems encode speech and meaning, and how grafies are realized in different scripts, fonts, and digital encodings. Understanding grafies helps in comparing languages, designing typefaces, and encoding text digitally.