English language spelling reform

Language and its spelling carries our history and culture. For example, “Wednesday” is not a phonetic spelling, but it reminds us that the weekday was named for Woden, the Anglo-Saxon god. Changing the spelling to “Wensday” throws that link away. Other words link us to the French culture of Norman invaders, to the Latin of the Christian church, and to Britain’s past as a colonial power gaining new words from Africa, India and elsewhere. These roots make English a hugely rich language of 700 000 words, even if it also means that spelling is not always straightforward. So simplifying spelling might make words easier to spell, but they could end up being harder to understand.

Actually English-speaking countries have similar school systems, so it is quite likely that teaching methods are the real problem. In any case, English is not totally illogical – there are clear patterns that most children learn easily. And phonetics is not the only or best way to learn spelling – most children learn hundreds of words as a whole (the “look-say” method) rather than breaking them down into phonetic syllables.

So we don’t need reform. If people are still worried about spelling problems, we could just be more relaxed about common misspellings. As long as the meaning is clear, misspellings could be accepted as alternative spellings. This would allow children to get on with learning history, science, etc. without everyone getting hung up on a few letters here or there. After all, Shakespeare commonly spelled words in different ways, including different versions of his own name!

The cost of change would be huge. Billions of people who speak some English would need to be taught a new system. Trillions of books would need to be thrown away and replaced with new versions. Computers and websites would all need to be changed. And hundreds of years of English literature would have to be translated into the new system, or people would soon be cut off from their literary birthright.

Change will be very hard to achieve. Unlike in countries like France and Italy, there is no agreed authority to make changes to the English language. When Germany and Portugal tried to reform their spelling there was a lot of resistance, both inside the country and from places like Austria and Brazil where the language was also spoken. And English is a much more international language – why should one English-speaking country have the right to bring in changes and make others follow them? Should it be Britain because it is where English began? Or the USA because it is the biggest and richest English-speaking country? Or India because it has the most people speaking English as a second language?

Why then is English so widely and easily learnt by so many students and adults around the world? It may be hard to learn to write like a native speaker, but it is quick and easy to learn enough English to communicate well. All languages have their own difficulties – English at least doesn’t go in for compound-word-building in the way German does, or have masculine and feminine like French. It has many fewer verb tenses than Russian. Chinese and Japanese have thousands of characters which have to be learnt. And in many languages like Danish the spoken and written forms have moved apart over the past two hundred years or so.

Trying to change the way English is spelled would raise up new barriers between people. What version of English should be used as the standard one for spelling purposes? Southern British English might change the spelling of “anyone” to “ennywun”, but a northerner would prefer “ennywon”. What about American and British accents (potaytoe or potartoe?)? What about Irish, African, Caribbean, Australian and Indian accented English? Moving to a phonetic system will only end up with one small group forcing their way of pronouncing English on everyone else. This will create division and bad feeling between English speakers. It might even lead to groups with different accents ending up producing different spelling reforms, so we stop being able to understand each other.