Why has English spelling reform never caught on?




  • English spelling is notorious in (literary) language learning for being chaotic. It would be better for reading and writing learners if the spelling were reformed to a more phonetic spelling like Italian or Finnish.

  • other language spellings have had success with spelling reform. Chinese writing was 'simplified' in the PRC and was adopted universally in the PRC (mainland China) but notoriously not in ROC (Taiwan). Turkish converted from the vowel-less Arabic script to the vowelled Roman alphabet.

  • there have been some unsuccessful reforms, for example German in the 1990's, which attempted to change some small handful of word spellings, which were used in newspapers and schools but just didn't catch on.


My question is why haven't any attempts at spelling reform worked out for English?



Answer



A 'why' question is very difficult to answer definitively, especially when there are many social and political issues to consider.


But there is one reason that seems to separate success from not.


A single authority makes a reform easier to enforce. Since English is spoken in many different Nations (US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc) not under some common educational or literary authority and there are already different spelling standards, it is very difficult to decide what exactly to reform to and difficult to enforce.


The PRC government (likewise Turkish) had control over the educational and journalistic systems in those countries at those times (and tellingly not in Taiwan or Germany respectively).


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?