A
phonemic orthography is 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.