Orthografia

Orthography is the conventional system for writing a language, including the set of letters or characters, the rules for spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and word separation. It defines how sounds, words, and sentences are represented in written form, but it is distinct from pronunciation and meaning. A language’s orthography may largely reflect its phonology, yet many languages retain historical spellings or digraphs that do not exactly mirror speech.

Standardization is usually achieved by language academies, dictionaries, publishers, and sometimes government bodies. These institutions issue normative rules and spellings, and may revise them through orthographic reforms to improve consistency, reduce ambiguity, or adapt to new technologies. Orthography also affects education, typography, and literacy testing, and is closely linked to the availability of standard keyboards and input methods.

Examples of features across languages: Spanish orthography uses the tilde in ñ and acute accents to mark stress or vowel quality; English orthography is characterized by irregular spellings and historical borrowings; French uses several diacritics on vowels to distinguish words; Turkish uses a Latin-derived alphabet with diacritics; many languages include diacritics such as the acute, grave, or circumflex marks. In some languages, capitalization, hyphenation, and the treatment of loanwords are governed by orthographic norms.

In the digital era, orthography intersects with text encoding (like Unicode), spell-checking, and standardized input methods, reinforcing stable spellings while accommodating evolving usage.