Grapholinguistics

Grapholinguistics is a branch of linguistics that concerns writing systems, their basic components (i.e. graphemes and glyphs) and the rules that define them.

Graphology examines the specifics of written texts in a certain language and their correspondence to the spoken language. One area is the descriptive analysis of implicit regularities in written words and texts (graphotactics, analogous to phonotactics) to formulate explicit rules (orthography) for the writing system that can be used in prescriptive education or in computer linguistics, e.g. for speech synthesis.

Study of the graphic units of language is divided into two branches, analogous to the handling of phonemes and phones in phonology and phonetics (the emic and etic areas of research). These are graphematics (sometimes graphemics), which studies systems of graphemes, and graphetics, which studies the distribution and form of graphs (e.g. through typography or elements of palaeography). Different schools of thought consider different entities to be graphemes; major points of divergence are the handling of punctuation, diacritic marks, digraphs or other multigraphs and non-alphabeticscripts.