Examples include Japanese kana, Hindi, Lao (since 1975), Spanish, Finnish, Turkish, Georgian, Latin, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Ukrainian, and Welsh.
In contrast, in deep (opaque) orthographies, the relationship is less direct, and the reader must learn the arbitrary or unusual pronunciations of irregular words.
They may reflect etymology (English, Danish, Swedish, Faroese, Chinese,[2] Tibetan, Mongolian, Thai, Khmer, Burmese, Lao (until 1975; now only used overseas), French, or Franco-Provençal).
Orthographies such as those of German, Hungarian (mainly phonemic with the exception ly, j representing the same sound, but consonant and vowel length are not always accurate and various spellings reflect etymology, not pronunciation), Portuguese, modern Greek, Icelandic, Korean, Tamil, and Russian are considered to be of intermediate depth as they include many morphophonemic features.
According to the orthographic depth hypothesis, shallow orthographies are more easily able to support a word recognition process that involves the language phonology.
[3][4] For languages with relatively deep orthographies such as English, French, unvocalised Arabic[citation needed] or Hebrew, new readers have much more difficulty learning to decode words.