Unifon

Unifon is a defunct Latin-based phonemic orthography for American English designed in the mid-1950s by 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, for example, reduced vowels in other American dialects that do not occur in Chicago. 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, and its last formal use (for the Tolowa language) was abandoned in 1996, but enthusiasts continued to publicize the scheme and advocate for its adoption as late as 2012.