english orthography is the orthography used in writing the english language, including english spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. like the orthographic systems of most world languages, it has a broad degree of standardization, but unlike most languages, english provides more than one way to spell nearly every phoneme, and most letters and letter-combinations can stand for different pronunciations depending on context and meaning. this is largely due to the complex history of the english language,a short history of english spelling together with the absence of systematic spelling reforms. in general, modern english spelling does not reflect the sound changes that have occurred since the late fifteenth century (such as the great vowel shift).english language. (2010). in encyclopÃ¦dia britannica. retrieved november 23, 2010, from encyclopÃ¦dia britannica online: http://www.britannica.com/ebchecked/topic/188048/english-language there are some variations in english orthography by global regions, some of which resulted from spelling reform efforts that succeeded only partially and only in certain regions. == function of the letters == note: in the following discussion, only one or two common pronunciations of american and british english varieties are used in this article for each word cited. other regional pronunciations may be possible for some words, but indicating all possible regional variants in the article is impractical.  === phonemic representation ===  as in most alphabetic languages, letters in english orthography may represent a particular sound. for example, the word cat  consists of three letters , , and , in which  represents the sound ,  the sound , and  the sound . multiple sequences of letters may perform this role as well as single letters. thus, in the word ship (pronounced ), the digraph  (two letters) represents the sound . in the word ditch, the three letters  represent the sound . less commonly, a single letter can represent multiple successive sounds. the most common example is the letter  which normally represents the consonant cluster  (for example, in the word six, pronounced ). the same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced in different ways when it occurs in different positions within a word. for instance, the 
English_language English_spelling Language_orthographies