Graphemik

Graphemik is the study of graphemes, the smallest units of a writing system that contribute to meaning or linguistic structure. In contrast to phonology, which analyzes spoken sounds, and to morphology, which analyzes word formation, graphemik focuses on how these sounds and words are represented in writing. A grapheme may be a single letter, such as "a," or a multi-letter unit such as "th" or "ough," or a diacritic-marked symbol that alters pronunciation. Graphemik distinguishes between the written symbol and the sound it represents and also accounts for allographs, which are different letterforms that realize the same grapheme in different contexts or fonts.

The field studies inventories of graphemes for a language, the rules for combining them (orthography), and the historical processes that create or change graphemic representations, such as sound shifts, loanwords, and reform movements. It also addresses issues of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, orthographic depth, and the treatment of ligatures or diacritics. It compares writing systems across types, including alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts, and notes how some scripts encode morphemes or syllables rather than phonemes.

Applications include natural language processing, optical character recognition, typography, and language education, where understanding graphemic structure aids decoding, generation, and teaching. Researchers may analyze corpora to quantify grapheme frequencies, study grapheme distribution in morphologically complex languages, or model historical changes in spelling. By clarifying the units of writing, graphemik provides a framework for describing how languages are recorded and how literacy practices evolve.