Digraph (orthography)

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Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for a pronunciation key.

A digraph, bigraph or digram is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters combined. This is often, but not necessarily, a sound (or more precisely a phoneme) which cannot be expressed using a single letter in the alphabet used for writing.

Sometimes, when digraphs do not represent a new phoneme, they are a relic from an earlier period in the language's history when they did (or remain phonemic only in certain dialects, e.g. wh in English).

Some schemes of Romanization make extensive use of digraphs (e.g. Cyrillic to Roman for English readers), while others rely solely on diacritics (e.g. Cyrillic to the modified Roman used for Turkish). To avoid ambiguity, transliteration based on diacritics is generally preferred in academic circles. Many languages, like Serbian and Turkish, have no digraphs, and so transliterations into these languages also cannot use digraphs.

In some languages, for example Hungarian, digraphs and trigraphs are counted as distinct letters in themselves, and assigned to a specific place in the alphabet, separate from that of the sequence of characters which composes them, in orthography or collation. Other languages, such as English, make no such convention, and split digraphs into their constituent letters for collation purposes.

There are three kinds of digraphs: sequences, reversals (really a special kind of sequence) and doubled letters.

Contents

[edit] Sequences

This is a group of two different letters in a specific order.

Examples from languages include:

See also French phonology
  • Greek (modern). Digraphs not included in the alphabet.
    • αι (ai) represents /e̞/
    • ει (ei) represents /i/
    • οι (oi) represents /i/
    • ου (oy) represents /u/
    • υι (yi) represents /i/
    • γγ (gg) as a digraph represents /ɡ/
    • γκ (gk) as a digraph represents /ɡ/
    • μπ (mp) as a digraph represents /b/
    • ντ (nt) as a digraph represents /d/
  • Wymysojer. Digraphs included in the alphabet.
    • ao

[edit] Doubled letters

These are pairs of identical letters. In some languages they indicate consonant length or vowel length, a stressed syllable or a new sound, but in other cases they are just part of the spelling convention. Ll is the most common in English, though it does not represent a different sound, but that is not the case in other languages; in Welsh, it stands for a voiceless lateral, and in Spanish it stands for a palatal consonant. Ee and oo are common examples from English of digraphs made up of vowels. Rr in Spanish and Italian indicate a trill, and are pronounced differently from a single r. Italian zz is an affricate.

  • Czech In Czech (and analogically in other Slavic languages) doubled letters occur in word-formation by prefixes and suffixes, and in composite words. Therefore, doubled letters are not considered part of the alphabet in Czech. Examples:
    • bezzubý (toothless)
    • cenný (valuable)
    • černooký (black-eyed)
  • Spanish. The digraph rr is considered part of the alphabet. It used to be sorted separately from r, but a reform by the Spanish Royal Academy has allowed it to be split into its constituent letters for collation.

[edit] Reversals

Reversals are sequences in which both possible orders of letters are common enough to be digraphs.

  • English
    • re corresponds to /ər/
    • le corresponds to /əl/

[edit] Ambiguity

In some cases, letters should not be interpreted as a digraph, notably in (English) compounds. For instance: hogshead, cooperate.

This is often not marked (it's simply conventional pronounciation), but some mark it, either via explicitly breaking the digraph, as in hogs-head, co-operate, or via a diacritic. The New Yorker writes cooperate as coöperate, for instance.

[edit] See also

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