Unifon

The beginning of the Lord's Prayer, rendered in modern Unifon (two fonts), and in standard English orthography

Unifon is a Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by Dr. John R. Malone, a Chicago economist and newspaper equipment consultant.

It was developed into a teaching aid to help children acquire reading and writing skills. Like the pronunciation key in a dictionary, Unifon attempts to match each of the sounds of spoken English with a single symbol, though not all sounds are distinguished. The method was tested in Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere during the 1960s and 1970s, but no statistical analysis of the outcome was ever published in an academic journal. Interest by educators has been limited, but a community of enthusiasts continues to publicize the scheme and advocate for its adoption.^[1]

Alphabet[]

The modern Unifon alphabet

The Unifon alphabet contains 40 glyphs, intended to represent the 40 "most important sounds" of the English language. Although the set of sounds has remained the same, several of the symbols were changed over the years, making modern Unifon somewhat different from "Old Unifon".^[2][3]

Of the 66 letters used in the various Unifon alphabets, 43 of the capitals can be unified with existing Unicode characters. Small letters are printed as small capitals. Fewer of them are available in Unicode as dedicated small-cap forms, but the usual Latin minuscules can be made small-cap in a Unifon font.