Phonemic orthography

A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but these orthographies differ in the degree to which they are in fact fully phonemic. English orthography, for example, though alphabetic, is highly non-phonemic, whereas Italian and Finnish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.

In less formal terms, a language with a highly phonemic orthography may be described as having regular spelling. Another terminology is that of deep and shallow orthographies, where the depth of an orthography is the degree to which it diverges from being truly phonemic (this concept can also be applied to non-alphabetic writing systems like syllabaries).