An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, punctuation, word boundaries, capitalization, hyphenation, and emphasis.
Orthographic norms develop through social and political influence at various levels, such as encounters with print in education, the workplace, and the state.
The English word orthography is first attested in the 15th century, ultimately from Ancient Greek: ὀρθός (orthós 'correct') and γράφειν (gráphein 'to write').
[3] Orthography in phonetic writing systems is often concerned with matters of spelling, i.e. the correspondence between written graphemes and the phonemes found in speech.
In linguistics, orthography often refers to any method of writing a language without judgement as to right and wrong, with a scientific understanding that orthographic standardization exists on a spectrum of strength of convention.
[7] Orthographies that use alphabets and syllabaries are based on the principle that written graphemes correspond to units of sound of the spoken language: phonemes in the former case, and syllables in the latter.
The syllabaries in the Japanese writing system (hiragana and katakana) are examples of almost perfectly shallow orthographies—the kana correspond with almost perfect consistency to the spoken syllables, although with a few exceptions where symbols reflect historical or morphophonemic features: notably the use of ぢ ji and づ zu (rather than じ ji and ず zu, their pronunciation in standard Tokyo dialect) when the character is a voicing of an underlying ち or つ (see rendaku), and the use of は, を, and へ to represent the sounds わ, お, and え, as relics of historical kana usage.
Korean hangul and Tibetan scripts were also originally extremely shallow orthographies, but as a representation of the modern language those frequently also reflect morphophonemic features.
A more systematic example is that of abjads like the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, in which the short vowels are normally left unwritten and must be inferred by the reader.
After the classical period, Greek developed a lowercase letter system with diacritics to enable foreigners to learn pronunciation and grammatical features.