A spelling reform is a deliberate, often authoritatively sanctioned or mandated change to spelling rules. Proposals for such reform are fairly common, and over the years, many languages have undergone such reforms. Recent high-profile examples are the German orthography reform of 1996 and the on-off Portuguese spelling reform of 1990, which is still being ratified.
There are various goals which may drive such reforms: facilitating literacy and international communication, making etymology clearer, or for aesthetic or political reasons.
Opposition is often based upon concern that old literature will become inaccessible, the presumed suppression of regional accents, the need to learn the new spellings, making etymology less clear, or simple conservatism based on concern over unforeseen effects. Reform efforts are further hampered by user habit and, for many languages, a lack of a central authority to set new spelling standards.
Spelling reform may also be associated with wider discussion about the official script, as well as language planning and language reform.
Orthographic reform may be reverted. In Romanian, the letter â was eliminated in 1953 but reintroduced in 1993.
Arguments for reform
In languages written with a phonetic script (such as an alphabet, syllabary, abugida or, to a lesser extent, abjad), one might expect that there would be a close match of the script or spelling with the spoken sound. However, even if they match at one time and place for some speakers, over time they often do not match well for the majority: one sound may be represented by various combinations of letters and one letter or group of letters pronounced differently. In cases where spelling takes account of grammatical features, these too may become inconsistent.
People who use non-standard spelling are often stigmatized because the mastery of standard spelling is often equated to the level of intelligence or formal education. Spelling is easier in languages with more or less consistent spelling systems, such as Finnish, Serbian, Italian and Spanish, owing either to the fact that pronunciation in these languages has changed relatively little since the establishment of their spelling systems, or the fact that non-phonemic etymological spellings have been replaced with phonemic unetymological spellings as pronunciation changed. Guessing the spelling of a word is more difficult after pronunciation changes significantly, thus yielding a non-phonetic etymological spelling system such as Irish or French. These spelling systems are still 'phonemic' (rather than 'phonetic') since pronunciation can be systematically derived from spelling, although the converse (i.e. spelling from pronunciation) may not be possible. English is an extreme example of a defective orthography in which spelling cannot be systematically derived from pronunciation, but it also has the more unusual problem that pronunciation cannot be systematically derived from spelling.
Spelling reforms have been proposed for various languages over the years; these have ranged from modest attempts to eliminate particular irregularities (such as SR1 or Initial Teaching Alphabet) through more far-reaching reforms (such as Cut Spelling) to attempts to introduce a full phonemic orthography, like the Shavian alphabet or its revised version Quikscript, the Latinization of Turkish or hangul in Korea.
Redundancy of letters is often an issue in spelling reform, which prompts the "Economic Argument"—significant cost savings in the production materials over time—as promulgated by George Bernard Shaw.
The idea of phonemic spelling has also been criticized as it would hide morphological similarities between words with differing pronunciations, thus obscuring their meanings. It is also argued that when people read, they do not try to work out the series of sounds composing each word, but instead they recognize words either as a whole or as a short series of meaningful units (for example morphology might be read as morph+ology, rather than as a longer series of phonemes). In a system of phonetic spelling, these morphemes become less distinct, due to the various pronunciations of allomorphs. For example, in English spelling, most past participles are spelled with -ed, even though its pronunciation can vary (compare raised and lifted).
One of the difficulties in introducing a spelling reform is how to reflect different pronunciations, often linked to regions or classes. If the reform seeks to be totally phonemic in a model dialect, speakers of other dialects will find conflicts with their own usage.
Arguments against reform
The need to learn the new spellings. The supposed need to reprint books and other publications in the new spellings. The continued need to learn the old spellings, as older books will exist for some time. The need to decide between conflicting proposals. One may even end up with inconsistent adoption between speech communities. If spellings are changed to more closely match pronunciation, then their etymology may become more opaque, and diverge from spellings of related words in the same language or in other languages, and also from the pronunciation of other dialects, making the text more opaque for speakers of those languages and dialects. Confusion during the transition period. Literacy mostly depends on access to education, rather than on the simplicity of a writing system. For example, even though Spanish spelling is much simpler than that of English, the US still has a higher literacy rate than Nicaragua.
By language Bulgarian
Bulgarian underwent a spelling reform in 1945, following the Russian model. Several Cyrillic alphabets with 28 to 44 letters were used in the beginning and middle of the 19th century during the effort to codify Modern Bulgarian until an alphabet with 32 letters, proposed by Marin Drinov, gained prominence in the 1870s. The alphabet of Marin Drinov was used until the orthographic reform of 1945, when the letters yat (uppercase Ѣ, lowercase ѣ) and yus (uppercase Ѫ, lowercase ѫ) were removed from the alphabet, reducing the number of letters to 30.
Chinese (romanization)
In the 1950s, the Language Reform Committee of the People's Republic of China devised the Hanyu Pinyin orthography and promulgated it as the official romanization system of mainland China. Since pinyin became the international standard for Chinese romanization in 1982, other romanizations (including the Wade-Giles system, Gwoyeu Romatzyh developed by Yuen Ren Chao, and Latinxua Sin Wenz) have become rarely used.
The Republic of China (Taiwan) continued to use Wade-Giles romanization until the turn of the 21st century, when the Tongyong Pinyin romanization was introduced. Tongyong Pinyin has been sporadically adopted throughout the island, and criticized for inconsistency. Hanyu Pinyin, the same system used in the mainland, was formally adopted in 2009.
Dutch
Dutch has undergone a series of major spelling reforms beginning in 1804—with varying levels of official backing and popular acceptance across Dutch-speaking areas.
The Dutch Language Union, founded in 1980 by the Netherlands and Belgium, is now the source of official reforms. In 1995 it issued the "Green Booklet" reform, and in 2005 the spelling changed again.
English
English spelling contains many irregularities for various reasons. English has generally preserved the original spelling when borrowing words, and even more importantly, English began to be widely written and printed during the Middle English period: the later development of modern English included a Great Vowel Shift and many other changes in phonology, yet the older spellings, which are no longer phonetic, have been kept. On the other hand, many words were refashioned to reflect their Latin or Greek etymology. For example, for "debt" early Middle English wrote det/dette, with the b being standardized in spelling in the 16th century, after its Latin etymon debitum; similarly for quer/quere, which was respelled as choir in the 17th century, modelled on Greek χορός chorus; in both cases, the pronunciation was not changed.Oxford English Dictionary, 1st edition, ss.vv.
Modern English has anywhere from 14 to 22 vowel and diphthong phonemes, depending on dialect, and 26 or 27 consonant phonemes. A simple phoneme-letter representation of this language within the 26 letters of the English alphabet is impossible. Therefore, most spelling reform proposals include multi-letter graphemes, as does current English spelling (for example the first two phonemes of "sheep" are represented by the digraphs , , and , , respectively). Diacritic marks and use of new letter shapes like Ʒʒ have also formed part of spelling reform proposals. The most radical approaches suggest replacing the Latin alphabet with a writing system designed for English, such as the Deseret alphabet or Shavian alphabet.
Critics have claimed that a consistent phonemically based system would be impractical: for example, phoneme distribution differs between British English and American English; furthermore, while English Received Pronunciation features about 20 vowels, some non-native dialects of English have 10 or even fewer. A phonemic system would therefore not be universal.
A number of proposals have been made to reform English spelling. Some were proposed by Noah Webster early in the 19th century. He was in part concerned to distinguish American from British usage. Some of his suggestions resulted in the differences between American and British spelling.
French
In 1990, a substantial reform ordered by the French prime minister changed the spelling of about 2000 words as well as some grammar rules. After much delay, the new recommended orthography received official support in France, Belgium, and Quebec in 2004, but it has not yet been widely adopted. The 2012 version of Larousse incorporates all of the changes. The 2009 version of Le Petit Robert incorporates most of the changes. There are 6000 words, including words which were not part of the 1990 reform, for example, charrette or charette, based on chariot. As of 16 March 2009, several major Belgian publishing groups have begun to apply the new spellings in their online publications.
German
German spelling was officially unified in 1901 and certain older spelling patterns were updated: for instance some occurrences of "th" were changed to "t".
In 1944 a spelling reform was due to be introduced, but it ultimately came to nothing because of World War II.
Even though German spelling was already more consistent than English or French spelling, the German-speaking countries signed an agreement on spelling reforms in 1996; these were planned to be gradually introduced beginning in 1998 and fully in force by 2005. The so-called was subject to dispute, and polls consistently showed a majority against the new spelling. In summer 2004, various newspapers and magazines returned to the old spelling, and in March 2006, the most controversial changes of were reverted. Therefore German media outlets which had formerly opposed the changes began to use the new spelling.
Greek
The classical, medieval, and early modern polytonic orthography inherited archaisms from Ancient Greek, which have been eliminated or simplified in the modern monotonic orthography. See also Katharevousa.
Indonesian
Indonesian underwent spelling reforms in 1947 and 1972, after which its spelling was more consistent with the form of the language spoken in Malaysia (i.e. Malaysian).
OldspellingNewspellingoeutjcdjjéejynjnysjsychkh The first of these changes (oe to u) occurred around the time of independence in 1947; all of the others were a part of an officially mandated spelling reform in 1972. Some of the old spellings, which were more closely derived from the Dutch language, still survive in proper names.
Japanese