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Concept
Digraph (orthography)
Summary
A digraph or digram (from the δίς , "double" and γράφω , "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.
Some digraphs represent phonemes that cannot be represented with a single character in the writing system of a language, like the English sh in ship and fish. Other digraphs represent phonemes that can also be represented by single characters. A digraph that shares its pronunciation with a single character may be a relic from an earlier period of the language when the digraph had a different pronunciation, or may represent a distinction that is made only in certain dialects, like the English wh. Some such digraphs are used for purely etymological reasons, like rh in English.
Digraphs are used in some Romanization schemes, like the zh often used to represent the Russian letter ж. As an alternative to digraphs, orthographies and Romanization schemes sometimes use letters with diacritics, like the Czech and Slovak š, which has the same function as the English digraph sh, like the Romanian Ț, which has the same function as the Slavic C, the letter Ť that is used in Czech and Slovak, which has the same function as the Hungarian digraph Ty, and the letter with the cedilla in a few Turkic languages that have the same function as the letter with the cedilla below followed by the letter h in English, for example, ç will become ch in English, and ş will become sh in English.
In some languages' orthographies, digraphs (and occasionally trigraphs) are considered individual letters, which means that they have their own place in the alphabet and cannot be separated into their constituent graphemes when sorting, abbreviating or hyphenating words. Examples of this are found in Hungarian (cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs), Czech (ch), Slovak (ch, dz, dž), Albanian (dh, gj, ll, nj, rr, sh, th, xh, zh), Gaj's Latin alphabet (lj, nj, dž), and in Uzbek (sh, ch, ng).
Official source
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