#SPELLING ALPHABET LETTERS IN ENGLISH UPDATE#
#SPELLING ALPHABET LETTERS IN ENGLISH CODE#

English letters fall into rough groups for these purposes. A modern, updated, globally friendly English spelling alphabet would be pretty useful right now, but getting people to use one might be harder than you’d think.Īll alphabets that use letters to represent sounds have names for their letters, to refer to them for things like spelling. The general connectivity of the world-including the ease of international video calls and the use of foreign call centers-means that spelling out a name or word is an increasingly common practice.

As mobile phones have replaced landlines, call quality has, strangely, gone down.

#SPELLING ALPHABET LETTERS IN ENGLISH UPDATE#

Plus there’s the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is something else entirely.) The history of spelling alphabets is fascinating and winding, but it’s notable that there hasn’t been an official update to the most commonly used English version in about half a century. This uses what is what’s called a “spelling alphabet,” or, confusingly, a “phonetic alphabet.” (The latter is confusing because it has little to do with phonemes, or a unit of sound in a language. “N as in Nancy, O, S as in Samuel, O, W, I, T as in Thomas, Z as in Zebra,” I chant. Because it’s uncommon, and because it would be a problem if my bank writes my name down as “Moskowitz,” I err on the side of caution. So far as I know, there are somewhere between 10 and 20 Nosowitzes in the world, and they’re all closely related to me. So that’s for letters.When someone on the phone-the doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company-asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out-it’s a pretty uncommon surname. It was finally adopted by the International Maritime Organization (“IMO”) in 1965. Because the ITU governs all international radio communications, it was also adopted by most radio operators, whether military, civilian, or amateur. The final version of the alphabet was implemented by the International Civil Aviation Organization (“ICAO”) on 1 March 1956, and the International Telecommunication Union (“ITU”) adopted it in 1959 when they mandated its usage via their official publication, Radio Regulations. Juliett is spelled with a tt for French speakers, because they may otherwise treat a single final t as silent. Alfa is spelled with an f as it is in most European languages because the English and French spelling alpha would not be pronounced properly by native speakers of some other languages – who may not know that ph should be pronounced as f. In the official version of the alphabet, the non-English spellings Alfa and Juliett are used.

#SPELLING ALPHABET LETTERS IN ENGLISH CODE#

To create the code, a series of international agencies over many years and multiple iterations assigned 26 code words to the letters of the English alphabet, so that the names for letters and numbers would be distinct enough to be easily understood by those who exchanged voice messages by radio or telephone, regardless of language differences or the quality of the connection. The NATO Phonetic Alphabet is instead a spelling alphabet Phonetic alphabets are used to indicate, through symbols or codes, what a speech sound or letter sounds like. The International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, commonly known as the NATO Phonetic Alphabet, is the world’s most widely used radiotelephone alphabet.Ĭontrary to what its name suggests, the NATO Phonetic Alphabet is not technically a phonetic alphabet. So think of this post as a community service. We hear snippets of it all the time … but not everyone knows of its derivation.

Spelling alphabet letters in english