Editing Grapheme (section)

==Relationship with phonemes==
{{main|Phonemic orthography}}
As mentioned in the previous section, in languages that use [[alphabet]]ic writing systems, many of the graphemes stand in principle for the [[phoneme]]s (significant sounds) of the language. In practice, however, the [[orthography|orthographies]] of such languages entail at least a certain amount of deviation from the ideal of exact grapheme–phoneme correspondence. A phoneme may be represented by a [[multigraph (orthography)|multigraph]] (sequence of more than one grapheme), as the [[digraph (orthography)|digraph]] ''sh'' represents a single sound in English (and sometimes a single grapheme may represent more than one phoneme, as with the Russian letter [[я]] or the Spanish c). Some graphemes may not represent any sound at all (like the ''b'' in English ''debt'' or the ''h'' in all Spanish words containing the said letter), and often the rules of correspondence between graphemes and phonemes become complex or irregular, particularly as a result of historical [[sound change]]s that are not necessarily reflected in spelling. "Shallow" orthographies such as those of standard [[Spanish language|Spanish]] and [[Finnish language|Finnish]] have relatively regular (though not always one-to-one) correspondence between graphemes and phonemes, while those of French and English have much less regular correspondence, and are known as [[orthographic depth|deep orthographies]].

Multigraphs representing a single phoneme are normally treated as combinations of separate letters, not as graphemes in their own right. However, in some languages a multigraph may be treated as a single unit for the purposes of [[collation]]; for example, in a [[Czech language|Czech]] dictionary, the section for words that start with {{angbr|ch}} comes after that for {{angbr|h}}.<ref>{{cite web|last=Zeman|first=Dan|title=Czech Alphabet, Code Page, Keyboard, and Sorting Order|url=http://old-site.clsp.jhu.edu/ws98/projects/nlp/doc/czech_env/czech-info.html|access-date=31 March 2012|publisher=Old-site.clsp.jhu.edu|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120415123555/http://old-site.clsp.jhu.edu/ws98/projects/nlp/doc/czech_env/czech-info.html|archive-date=15 April 2012|url-status=dead}}</ref> For more examples, see {{section link|Alphabetical order|Language-specific conventions}}.