grafemien

Graphemes are the smallest units of a writing system that can distinguish meaning in a language. The term is used in linguistics to refer to the abstract, language-specific unit that corresponds to the sounds (phonemes) of speech or to a functional element of writing. A grapheme may be a single symbol, such as the letter a, or a combination of symbols, such as the digraphs sh or ng, which represent a single sound or a distinct letter in a language’s orthography. The written shape that a reader actually sees is called a glyph; multiple glyphs can represent the same grapheme, and a single glyph can sometimes carry different graphemes in different contexts.

Graphemes come in several types. Simple graphemes consist of one letter, such as a, b, or t. Composite graphemes are made of two or more letters that together represent one sound or unit, such as ch, sh, or a diagraph like th. Some graphemes are modified by diacritics, as in é or ö, which can create new graphemes or alter pronunciation. In many scripts, graphemes are further organized into larger units, such as syllabic or logographic elements in non-alphabetic systems.

The relationship between graphemes and phonemes varies by language, yielding shallow or deep orthographies. English has a relatively irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondence, while languages with more regular systems exhibit more predictable mappings. In non-alphabetic scripts, graphemes may represent morphemes or entire words rather than individual phonemes. In computing and typography, grapheme is also used to describe user-perceived characters, where a single grapheme may consist of a base character plus one or more combining marks, forming a grapheme cluster in Unicode.