pronunciation vs spelling - What do you call languages with words that are pronounced the same way they are written?


In some languages such as Korean or Japanese hiragana, the pronunciation of words is exactly derived from the characters in the words. On the other hand, for languages such as English, you cannot accurately pronounce the words simply based on the spelling of the words.


What do you call each of these languages?



Answer



You are referring to languages with phonemic orthographies :





  • an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme-phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but these orthographies differ in the degree to which they are in fact fully phonemic. English orthography, for example, though alphabetic, is highly non-phonemic, whereas Italian and Finnish orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.




  • Orthographies with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include those of Maltese, Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Italian, Turkish. (Wikipedia)





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