German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be differen

German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be different in all three countries. Even within Germany, somebody from Munich would either write something very different from somebody in Berlin, or they would have to imagine how a Hannoverian would pronounce the word, in order to write the standard spelling. Because German orthography is standardized and is not a phonetic alphabet, people in Switzerland can say /r/ and people in the Rhineland can say /ʁ/ but they both write <r> and thus spell words the same way.