Phonologytoorthography

Phonology-to-orthography is the study of how the sounds of a language are represented in its writing system. It describes the conventions and rules that determine how spoken phonology is encoded as graphemes, digraphs, and other written units, and how those symbols can be interpreted back into pronunciation. The field examines the relationship between phonemes, phonotactics, and the morphophonemic patterns that influence spelling, as well as the historical and social forces that shape orthographic choices.

Languages vary in how directly their spelling maps to pronunciation. Phonemic orthographies aim for a transparent, largely one-to-one mapping between phonemes and graphemes, often with relatively regular spelling rules; Spanish, Italian, Turkish, and Finnish are commonly cited examples. In practice, all languages exhibit some irregularities due to historical sound changes, dialect variation, loanwords, and productive morphophonemic alternations. English, for instance, combines irregular spellings, multiple pronunciations of the same grapheme, and silent letters, reflecting complex historical layers. Some writing systems also encode additional information such as tone, stress, or etymology, which can complicate a straightforward phonology-to-orthography mapping.

In computational linguistics, phonology-to-orthography is addressed by grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) and phoneme-to-grapheme (P2G) conversion. These systems underpin speech synthesis, speech recognition, spelling correction, and OCR. Approaches range from rule-based and linguistic models to statistical and neural methods, reflecting the balance between regular phonological patterns and irregular historical developments.