Old English/Orthography

How to write Old English correctly
Technically speaking, Old English was historically written with laxer standards than in Modern English - the same word could often be written in several different ways; and spelling was heavily influenced by pronunciation. But, for the modern reader, who is accustomed to a uniform writing for his words (one word, one spelling), we will thus use a standard orthography here based on Early West Saxon (an early standard for Old English).

Consonants
There were 19 consonants in the Old English language: b c d f g h k l m n p r s t v ƿ x þ ð. Sometimes, you will see q and z in foreign words.

Vowels
There were 7 (sometimes 8) vowels in Old English: a æ, e, i, o, u, y, and sometimes œ (Northumbrian).

Sounds of Old English
The inventory of surface sounds (whether allophones or phonemes) of Old English is as shown below.

Consonants
1. The exact nature of Old English r is not known. It may have been an alveolar approximant, as in most Modern English accents, an alveolar flap , or an alveolar trill. In this article we will use the symbol indiscriminately to stand for this phoneme.

Consonant allophones
The sounds marked in parentheses in the table above are allophones:
 * is an allophone of occurring after  and when geminated
 * For example, senġan "to singe" is <  <
 * and bryċġ "bridge" is <  <  <
 * is an allophone of occurring before  and
 * For example, hring "ring" is ; did not occur alone word-finally in Old English as it does in Modern English.
 * are allophones of respectively, occurring between vowels or voiced consonants.
 * For example, stafas "letters" is <, smiþas "blacksmiths" is  < , and hūses "house (genitive)" is  <.
 * are allophones of occurring in coda position after front and back vowels respectively. The evidence for this is indirect, as it is not indicated in the orthography. Nevertheless, the fact that there was historically a fronting of  to  and of  to  after front vowels makes it very likely. Moreover, in late Middle English,  sometimes became  (e.g. tough, cough), but only after back vowels, never after front vowels. This is explained if we assume that the allophone  sometimes became  but the allophone  never did.
 * For example, cniht "boy" is, while ġeþōht "thought" is
 * The sequences /hƿ hl hn hr/ were realized as [ʍ l ̥ n ̥ r ̥].
 * is an allophone of occurring after a vowel or liquid. Historically,  is older, and originally appeared in word-initial position as well; for Proto-West Germanic (PWG) (and probably the earliest Old English), it makes more sense to say that  is an allophone of  after a nasal. But because  became  word-initially, it makes more sense to treat the stop as the basic form and the fricative as the allophonic variant.
 * For example, dagas "days" is and burgum "castles (dative)" is

Vowels
The front mid rounded vowels occur in some dialects of Old English, but not in the best attested Late West Saxon dialect. There is also historical evidence suggesting that short /e/ and /o/ were phonetically lower and/or more centralized (perhaps and ) than the corresponding long ones.

2. It is uncertain whether the diphthongs spelt ie/īe were pronounced  or. The fact that this diphthong was merged with in many dialects suggests the former.

Dialects
There were four main dialects in Old English: West Saxon, Anglian (consisting of Mercian and Northumbrian), and Kentish. West Saxon has the most documented evidence, which is why it is used here. But the other three dialects show some differences in spelling, grammar, and vocabulary which will be explored in the chapter on dialects.