Unifon

Unifon is a Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by Dr. John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant.

[6] Beginning before 1960 and continuing into the 1980s, Margaret S. Ratz used Unifon to teach first-graders at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois.

[7] By the summer of 1960, the ABC-TV affiliate station in Chicago produced a 90-minute program in which Ratz taught three children how to read, in "17 hours with cookies and milk," as Malone described it.

During the following two years, Unifon gained national attention, with coverage from NBC's Today Show and CBS's On the Road with Charles Kuralt (in a segment called "The Day They Changed the Alphabet").

In 1981, Malone turned over the Unifon project to Dr. John M. Culkin, a media scholar who was a former Jesuit priest and Harvard School of Education graduate.

The chief driving force behind this effort was Tom Parsons of Humboldt State University, who developed spelling schemes for Hupa, Yurok, Tolowa, and Karok, which were then improved by native scholars.

[8] The special non-ASCII characters used in the Unifon alphabet have been assigned code points in one of the Private Use Areas by the ConScript Unicode Registry.