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English language spelling reform is the collective term for various campaigns and efforts to change the spelling of the English language to attempt to make it less awkward to use and to enhance its ease of learning. The movement has attracted a spattering of amateur and professional linguists, over a long history with some mixed successes. Their efforts culminate in various endorsements and reform proposals, which may range from individual spelling suggestions to a system overhaul proposal.

Supporters assert that the many inconsistencies and irregularities of English spelling lead to severe difficulties for learners. They believe this leads to a lower level of literacy among English speakers compared with speakers of languages having a spelling system that is more consistent in representing meaning as well as pronunciation. Many reformers think that it should more faithfully conform to how the language is spoken, and assert that there are costs to the environment and business and other users in retaining traditional spelling.

English does in fact have a very poor phonemic orthography, or correspondence between how the words are written and how they are spoken. This owes much to a complex, and in many cases unfortunate, history of the language.^[1]

There is opposition to spelling reform from traditionalists who feel that something is to be lost from simplifying the spelling of English; this can range from numinous 'old world' sensibilities to feared concrete financial losses by opposing vested interests (notably dictionary makers, printers, and purveyors of rival solutions or palliative measures such as shorthand, remedial literacy and synthetic phonics). Opposition would also include etymological losses. An example of this is the word aitiology, which is the study of cause. Aitiology derives from the Greek word aitia (αἰτία), which means 'cause'. The spelling given makes this connection manifest, whereas the alternative spelling etiology does not.

Despite intelligent arguments on both sides, however, the largest base of opponents to spelling reform arguably remains the average person who is unwilling to change. But, as in other fields, one needs to look at where the average person gets his or her ideas from. English spelling reformers worldwide have noticed a tendency for unelected 'authorities' to weigh in heavily when these matters are debated online, e.g., in comments columns.

History

After the invention of the printing press in the 1440s, English spelling began to become fixed. This took place gradually through printing houses, whereby the master printer would choose the spellings "that most pleased his fancy". These spellings then became the "house style".^[2] Many of the earliest printing houses that printed English were staffed by Hollanders, who changed many spellings to match their Dutch orthography. Examples include the silent h in ghost (to match Dutch gheest, which later became geest), aghast, ghastly and gherkin. The silent h in other words—such as ghospel, ghossip and ghizzard—was later removed.^[3]

There have been two periods when spelling reform of the English language has attracted particular interest.

1550 to 1806

The first of these periods was between the middle of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th when a number of publications outlining proposals for reform were published. Some of these proposals were:

De recta et emendata linguæ angliæ scriptione in 1568 by Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State to Edward VI and Elizabeth I
An Orthographie in 1569 by John Hart, Chester Herald
Booke at Large for the Amendment of English Orthographie in 1580 by William Bullokar
Logonomia Anglica in 1621 by Dr. Alexander Gill, headmaster of St Paul's School in London
English Grammar in 1634 by Charles Butler, vicar of Wootton St Lawrence^[4]

These proposals generally did not attract serious consideration because they were of too radical a nature or were based on an insufficient understanding of the phonology of English.^[5] However, more conservative proposals were more successful. James Howell in his Grammar of 1662 recommended minor changes to spelling, such as changing logique to logic, warre to war, sinne to sin, toune to town and true to tru.^[5] Many of these spellings are now in general use. But the Restoration also brought with it the introduction of a rococo French influence, prompting English spelling towards a cavalier retreat to a complex spelling culture (e.g., 'Charles' replacing 'Charls'), arguably associated with the monarchy, which lasts to this day. Oxford, one-time headquarters of the embattled Royalist army, now hosts the English dictionary so equated with supreme English linguistic authority in the current era (altho it has been argued that those publishing dictionaries thereby have a commercial interest in keeping spelling less than transparent).

1806 to 1906

The second period started in the 19th century and appears to coincide with the development of phonetics as a science.^[5] In 1806, Noah Webster published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language. It included an essay on the oddities of modern orthography and his proposals for reform. Many of the spellings he used, such as color and center, would become hallmarks of American English. In 1807 Webster began compiling an expanded dictionary. It was published in 1828 as An American Dictionary of the English Language. Although it drew some protest, the reformed spellings were gradually adopted throughout the United States.^[6]

In 1837, Isaac Pitman published his system of phonetic shorthand, while in 1848 Alexander John Ellis published A Plea for Phonetic Spelling. Both of these were proposals for a new phonetic alphabet. Although unsuccessful, they drew widespread interest.

By the 1870s, the philological societies of Great Britain and America chose to consider the matter. After the "International Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography" that was held in Philadelphia in August 1876, societies were founded such as the English Spelling Reform Association and American Spelling Reform Association.^[7] That year, the American Philological Society adopted a list of eleven reformed spellings for immediate use. These were: are→ar, give→giv, have→hav, live→liv, though→tho, through→thru, guard→gard, catalogue→catalog, (in)definite→(in)definit, wished→wisht.^[8]^[9] In 1883, the American Philological Society and American Philological Association worked together to produce 24 spelling reform rules, which were published that year. In 1898, the American National Education Association adopted its own list of 12 words to be used in all writings. These were: tho, altho, thoro, thorofare, thru, thruout, catalog, decalog, demagog, pedagog, prolog, program.^[10]

1906 onward

The Simplified Spelling Board was founded in the United States in 1906. The SSB's original 30 members consisted of authors, professors and dictionary editors. Andrew Carnegie, a founding member, supported the SSB with yearly bequests of more than US$300,000.^[11] In April 1906 it published a list of 300 words,^[12] which included 157^[13] spellings that were already in common use in American English.^[14] In August 1906 the SSB word list was adopted by Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered the Government Printing Office to start using them immediately. However, in December 1906 the U.S. Congress passed a resolution and the old spellings were reintroduced.^[9] Nevertheless, some of the spellings survived and are commonly used in American English today, such as anaemia/anæmia→anemia and mould→mold. Others such as mixed→mixt and scythe→sithe did not survive.^[15] In 1920, the SSB published its Handbook of Simplified Spelling, which set forth over 25 spelling reform rules. The handbook noted that every reformed spelling now in general use was originally the overt act of a lone writer, who was followed at first by a small minority. Thus, it enouraged people to "point the way" and "set the example" by using the reformed spellings whenever they can.^[16] However, with its main source of funds cut-off, the SSB disbanded later that year.

In Britain, the cause of spelling reform was promoted from 1908 by the Simplified Spelling Society and attracted a number of prominent supporters. One of these was George Bernard Shaw (author of Pygmalion) and much of his considerable will was left to the cause. Among members of the society the conditions of his will gave rise to major disagreements which hindered the development of a single new system.^[17]

In 1949, a Labour MP, Dr. Mont Follick, introduced a private member's bill in the House of Commons, which failed at the second reading. However in 1953 he again had the opportunity and this time it passed the second reading by 65 votes to 53.^[18] Because of anticipated opposition from the House of Lords, the bill was withdrawn after assurances from the Minister of Education that research would be made into improving spelling education. This led in 1961 to James Pitman's Initial Teaching Alphabet, introduced into many British schools in an attempt to improve child literacy.^[19] Although it succeeded in its own terms, the advantages were lost when children transferred to conventional spelling and after several decades the experiment was discontinued.

In 1969 Harry Lindgren proposed Spelling Reform 1 (SR1), which calls for the short /ɛ/ sound (as in bet) to always be spelt with <e> (for example friend→frend, head→hed). For a short time, this proposal was popular in Australia and was adopted by the Australian Government. In Geoffrey Sampson's book Writing Systems (1985) he wrote that SR1 "has been adopted widely by Australians. Many general interest paperbacks and the like are printed in SR1; under Gough Whitlam's Labour Government the Australian Ministry of Helth was officially so spelled (though, when Whitlam was replaced by a liberal administration, it reintroduced orthographic conservatism)".^[20]

Arguments for reform

Advocates of spelling reform make these basic arguments:^{[citation needed]}

Spelling should change alongside pronunciation

Pronunciations change gradually over time and the alphabetic principle that lies behind English (and every other alphabetically written language) gradually becomes corrupted. If the maintenance of regularity in the orthography of English is desired, then spelling needs to be amended to account for the changes.
Spellings do change,^[21] regardless of conscious public resistance, just slowly and not in any organized way. Music was spelt as musick until the 1880s, and fantasy was spelt as phantasy until the 1920s.^[22]

Ambiguity leads to confusion

Unlike many other languages, English spelling has never been systematically updated and, as a result, today only partly observes the alphabetic principle. As a consequence, English orthography is a system of weak rules with many exceptions and ambiguities.

Most phonemes in English can be spelled in more than one way. Conversely, many graphemes in English have multiple pronunciations, such as the different pronunciations of the combination ough in words like through, though, thought, thorough, tough, and trough. These kinds of incoherences can be found throughout the English language, and would naturally cause extra difficulty in learning and practice and lead to uncertainty due to their sheer number.

Such ambiguity is particularly problematic in the case of homographs with different pronunciations that vary according to context, such as bow, desert, live, read, wind, and wound. Ambiguous words like these make it necessary to learn the correct context in which to use the different pronunciations and thus increase the difficulty of learning to read English.

As an ideal, a closer relationship between phonemes and spellings may eliminate most exceptions and ambiguities and make the language easier to master for students. If done with care, a revision in such a direction would not impose an undue burden on mature native speakers.

We should undo the damage

Some proposed simplified spellings – such as frend for friend (see Shakespeare's grave, right) and ake for ache – already exist as variant spellings in old literature. Reinstating these old forms would not create new spellings.
Some exceptions in English spelling are the result of attempts by scholars to "correct" older spelling by adding silent letters to reflect the word's Latin or Greek origin, or create a false correlation with those.^[23] For example, the word island was thought to come from Latin insula, but is actually of Anglo-Saxon origin^[23] and was once spelled igland, and later, iland (compare with the corresponding Dutch word eiland).
Doubt and debt have never been pronounced with a [b] sound; they came to English from French, and the 'b' was taken in from their Latin antecedents dubitum and debitum.

Coherence with etymological roots

Many English words are based on French modifications (e.g., colour and analogue) even though they are derived from Latin or Greek. Spelling reform by reason of etymological origin should not be confused with phonetic spelling reform, even though the spelling of some words may converge; in other cases, the objectives may be divergent (e.g., fibre). See American and British English spelling differences for greater detail.

We should remove redundancy

The English alphabet contains several letters whose characteristic sounds are already represented elsewhere in the alphabet. These include X, Q, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) C. As a result, many linguists consider our use of the alphabet to be redundant and inefficient.

Obstacles

There are a number of barriers in the development and implementation of a reformed orthography for English:

Public resistance to spelling reform has been consistently strong, at least since the early 19th century, when spelling was codified by the influential English dictionaries of Samuel Johnson (1755) and Noah Webster (1806).
English vocabulary is largely a melding of ancient Latin, Greek, French and Germanic terms, which have very different phonemes and approaches to spelling. Some reform proposals tend to favor one approach over the other, resulting in a large percentage of words that must change spelling to fit the new scheme.
The large number of vowel sounds in English and the small number of vowel letters make phonemic spelling difficult to achieve. This is especially true for the three vowels /uː/ (e.g.: fume, moon), /ʌ/ (e.g.: hut, sun) and /ʊ/ (e.g.: look, put) which are represented in English by only two symbols, oo and u. Spelling these phonemically cannot be done without resorting to unusual or novel letter combinations, diacritic marks or the introduction of new letters.^[24]
The variety of local accents makes it difficult to agree upon spellings which take into account most accents. Furthermore, some words have more than one acceptable pronunciation, regardless of dialect (e.g. economic, either). Spelling reform may solve this issue by continuing to allow multiple pronunciations of a standard spelling, as happens today with the modern standard spelling of such words, or by allowing multiple acceptable spellings for such words. Other spelling reform proposals impose a new spelling that is based on a particular pronunciation.
Some inflections are pronounced differently in different words. For example, plural -s and possessive -'s are both pronounced differently in each of cat(')s (/s/), dog(')s (/z/) and horse(')s (/ɨz/). The handling of this particular difficulty distinguishes morphemic proposals, which tend to spell such inflectional endings the same, from phonemic proposals that spell the endings according to their pronunciation.
The English language is the only language in the top ten major languages that lacks a worldwide regulatory body with the power to promulgate changes to orthography. The establishment of such a body may be necessary before any co-ordinated efforts to reform English spelling can be undertaken globally.
Some words are spelled so differently when compared with their pronunciation – such as tongue and stomach – that changing the spelling of such words would noticeably change the accustomed shape of the word. Similarly, the irregular spelling of very common words such as is, are, have, done and of makes it difficult to respell such words to remove the irregularity without introducing a noticeable change to the appearance of English text. Such difficulties tend to create acceptance issues.
Spelling reforms render pre-reform writings more difficult to understand and read correctly in their original form, often necessitating translation and republication. Today, relatively few people choose to read classic literature in the original spellings as most of it has been republished using modern spellings.^[25] Similarly, changes in "modern" spelling could require new translations of old text, and translation of previously "modern" texts into the new standard, in order to keep the works accessible going forward.
For people profoundly deaf since birth or early childhood (who might already find reading and writing very challenging), each change of spelling would be arbitrary, as they would be unable to use sounds as a guide, and they would thus have to unlearn and learn each case individually.^{[citation needed]}^{[clarification needed]}

Criticisms

Writing conveys meaning, not phonemes

The central criticism of many purely phonemic proposals for spelling reform is that written language is not a purely phonemic analogue of the spoken form. When advocates claim that the units of understanding are phonemes, critics take exception, claiming that the basic units are instead words. Writing is intended to convey meaning to the reader. Reforms such as English Spelling on One Page, Interspel, try to maximise this as a modification of the purely phonemic. Some of the most phonemic spelling reform proposals respell closely-related words less similarly than they are at present, such as electric, electricity and electrician, or (with full vowel reform) photo, photograph and photography.

Cognates in other languages

Because English is a West Germanic language that has borrowed vocabulary heavily from distant and unrelated languages, the spelling of a word often reflects its origin. This gives a clue as to the meaning of the word by providing a historical marker for the origin, useful for readers to see relationships within and between languages. For example, Latin- or Greek-based word parts are often reducible to their meaning. Even if their pronunciation has deviated from the original pronunciation, the written form of the word is a record of the phoneme, so derived words give clues to their own meaning, but respelling them could obscure that relationship. The same is true for words inherited from Germanic whose current spelling still resembles its cognates in English's related languages of Dutch and German, which a phonetic spelling reform could obscure in some cases, such as light/German Licht, knight/ German Knecht; ocean/French océan, occasion/French occasion. Those spelling reform proposals that respell words phonetically may thus obscure the connection between English and the Romance and Germanic languages, as well as Latin and Greek.^[26]

Whose accent?

Another criticism of spelling reform is that many proposals generally do not take into account the main variants, dialects and regional accents by choosing to spell words to match the pronunciation in a particular accent. A popular example is Rhotic and non-rhotic accents. As another example, the first syllable in the pronunciation of the word simultaneously can rightfully be as the first sound of psychic /sɑɪ/, or as the first sound of cymbal, /sɪ/, yet SoundSpel purports siemultaeniusly as the spelling, indicating preference of the former. Many reform proposals ignore or overlook distinctions in regional accents that are still represented in the orthography. Examples include the distinguishing of fern, fir and fur that is maintained in Irish and Scottish English; the distinction between toe and tow that is maintained in a few regional accents in England; and the tendency in most accents to distinguish between the vowels in marry /mæri/, merry /mɛri/, and Mary /meəri/.

False friends

Many reform proposals attempt to make too many changes to English orthography at once and do not allow for any transitional period where the old spellings and the new may be in use together. The problem is an overlap in words where a particular word could be an unreformed spelling of one word or a reformed spelling of another, akin to false friends when learning a foreign language.

For example, a reform could propose to respell wonder as wunder and wander as wonder. However, both cannot be done at once because this causes ambiguity. During any transitional period, is wonder the unreformed spelling of wonder or the reformed spelling of wander? (This could be resolved by using the old wander with the new wunder.) Other similar chains of words are device → devise → *devize, warm → worm → *wurm and rice → rise → *rize.

==Criticism rebuttals== This Section really destroys the objectivity of the page.

Writing conveys meaning, not phonemes - rebuttal

The response of an advocate to the sentiment that the basic units of understanding are words, might be summed up with: "Do you like the alphabet, or not?"

Cognates in other languages - rebuttal

An advocate would be quick to point out that the fascination with retaining much of the word's origin in spelling is often seen as peculiar to English-speakers in the international community.

Whose accent? - rebuttal

Advocates tend to see this point as less of a flaw and more of a challenge. It is very admittedly something which needs addressing in any proposal, however. Various solutions have been proposed. A few have tried to introduce simple mechanisms for catering to specific variations in accent. Some have sidestepped the issue altogether by promoting some kind of application of free spelling, in which one spells according to the local accent. Regardless, though, advocates are firm in their stance that being difficult or challenging is not a reason to abandon the idea altogether.

False friends - rebuttal

This argument is very similar to Whose accent? above in its intent. In addition to the beginning sentiment given above, advocates would go as far as saying that even if this cannot be resolved, the resulting confusion would be less than what we currently suffer under a sometimes irrational and chaotic system, and furthermore, would be only temporary.

Spelling reform proposals

Most spelling reforms attempt to improve phonemic representation, but some attempt genuine phonetic spelling, usually by changing the basic English alphabet or making a new one. All spelling reforms aim for greater regularity in spelling.

Using the basic English alphabet

Common features:

They do not introduce any new letters, symbols or diacritics.
They rely upon familiar digraphs.
They try to maintain the appearance of existing words.

Notable proposals include:

Extending or replacing the basic English alphabet

Among other things, these proposals seek to eliminate the extensive use of digraphs such as "ch", "gh", "kn-", "-ng", "ph", "qu", "sh", voiced "th", voiceless "th" and "wh-". The impetus for removing digraphs is so each letter represents a single sound. In a digraph, the two letters do not represent their individual sounds but instead an entirely different and discrete sound, which can sometimes lead to mishaps in pronunciation, in addition to much lengthier words.