Editing Corsican language (section)

== Alphabet and spelling ==
[[File:FuneraryInscriptionInErbaggio.jpg|thumb|Funerary Inscription in Corsican language at the cemetery of Erbaggio ([[Nocario]])]]
{{Main|Corsican alphabet}}
Corsican is written in the standard [[Latin script]], using 21 of the letters for native words. The letters j, k, w, x, and y are found only in foreign names and French vocabulary. The digraphs and trigraphs ''chj'', ''ghj'', ''sc'' and ''sg'' are also defined as "letters" of the alphabet in its modern scholarly form (compare the presence of ''ch'' or ''ll'' in the old Spanish alphabet) and appear respectively after ''c'', ''g'' and ''s''.

The primary diacritic used is the [[grave accent]], indicating word stress when it is not [[penult]]imate. In scholarly contexts, [[syllable|disyllables]] may be distinguished from [[diphthong]]s by use of the [[diaeresis (diacritic)|diaeresis]] on the former vowel (as in Italian and distinct from French and English). In older writing, the [[acute accent]] is sometimes found on stressed {{angle bracket|e}}, the [[circumflex]] on stressed {{angle bracket|o}}, indicating respectively ({{IPA|/e/}}) and ({{IPA|/o/}}) phonemes.

Corsican has been regarded as a dialect of Italian historically, similar to the Romance lects developed on the Italian peninsula, and in writing, it also resembles Italian (with the generalised substitution of -''u'' for final -''o'' and the articles ''u'' and ''a'' for ''il/lo'' and ''la'' respectively; however, both the dialect of [[Cap Corse]] and Gallurese retain the original articles ''lu'' and ''la''). On the other hand, the phonemes of the modern Corsican dialects have undergone complex and sometimes irregular phenomena depending on phonological context, so the pronunciation of the language for foreigners familiar with other Romance languages is not straightforward.