Firstly, let’s think about the alphabet, what is the alphabet?
It is a group of letters that are used in a language, showing the shapes of the letters. So, how many letters are in the English language? If you don’t know, have a look at the picture below and count them.
There are 26 in total, did you get the correct answer? The picture shows the alphabet with the capital and lowercase letter. These are all the letters used to form words in the English language.
Now, we can see what an alphabetic code is. It is a code which shows the relationship between the sounds (phonemes) and the letter or letter groups (graphemes) in the language.
In the English language there are only 26 letters but these letters and combinations of letters can make around 44 sounds (phonemes) and then these sounds can be written in a number of ways (graphemes) to represent the sounds (phonemes). For example, look at the long vowel sound /eɪ/ below, you can see that there are 9 ways to read and write down this sound.
