English Braille

English Braille
Grade-2 Braille
British Revised Braille
Script type (non-linear)
Time period
1902
Print basis
English alphabet
LanguagesEnglish
Related scripts
Parent systems
Child systems
unified international braille
Unified English Braille
Irish Braille
Unicode
U+2800 to U+283F

English Braille, also known as Grade 2 Braille,[1] is the braille alphabet used for English. It consists of around 250 letters (phonograms), numerals, punctuation, formatting marks, contractions, and abbreviations (logograms). Some English Braille letters, such as ⟨ch⟩,[2] correspond to more than one letter in print.

There are three levels of complexity in English Braille. Grade 1 is a nearly one-to-one transcription of printed English and is restricted to basic literacy. Grade 2, which is nearly universal beyond basic literacy materials, abandons one-to-one transcription in many places (such as the letter ⟨ch⟩) and adds hundreds of abbreviations and contractions. Both Grade 1 and Grade 2 have been standardized. "Grade 3" is any of various personal shorthands that are almost never found in publications. Most of this article describes the 1994 American edition of Grade 2 Braille, which is largely equivalent to British Grade 2 Braille.[3] Some of the differences with Unified English Braille, which was officially adopted by various countries between 2005 and 2012, are discussed at the end.

Braille is frequently portrayed[by whom?] as a re-encoding of the English orthography used by sighted people. However, braille is a separate writing system, not a variant of the printed English alphabet.[4]

  1. ^ "English Braille" normally refers to Grade 2. The more basic Grade 1 Braille, which is only used by learners, is specified as "English Braille, Grade 1" (Braille Through Remote Learning).
  2. ^ ⟨Angle brackets⟩ will be used to indicate transcriptions of braille letters into the Latin alphabet.
  3. ^ compare American (BANA) here with British (BAUK) here.
  4. ^ Daniels & Bright, 1996, The World's Writing Systems, p 817–818