Orthografi

Orthografi, or orthography, is the conventional spelling system of a language. It prescribes the letters and diacritics used to represent the language in writing, together with rules for punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation, and word separation. Orthography reflects historical development and phonology, but is not always a direct map from speech to writing; many languages retain irregular spellings due to historical sound changes or borrowings.

Standard orthography provides a single reference form for education, publishing, and official communication, though regional dialects often differ in pronunciation and sometimes in informal spelling. In multilingual contexts, different countries or communities may adopt distinct standardized variants (for example, Bokmål and Nynorsk in Norwegian, or American and British spellings in English). Some languages also use diacritics to mark vowels, tonal distinctions, or stress.

Orthographic standardization is often achieved through academies, philological committees, or government language planning. Examples include Turkish, which adopted a Latin-based alphabet in 1928; German orthography reform in the 1990s; and ongoing discussions about English spelling regularization. Finnish and Spanish orthographies are noted for relatively high phoneme-grapheme correspondence, whereas English exhibits considerable irregularity due to historical layers.

In the digital age, orthography interacts with typography and encoding. Unicode and standardized input methods support consistent representation of letters and punctuation across platforms, while spell checkers and dictionaries help learners and writers adhere to the standard form. Spelling reforms remain debated, balancing pronunciation, literacy, and cultural heritage.