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. Reforms which mainly eliminate needless difficulties ought to take account of such arguments. Reform efforts are further hampered by 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.
In languages written with alphabetic or syllabary scripts, 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 often suffer from adverse opinions, as a person's mastery of standard spelling is often equated to his or her level of formal education or intelligence.
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A phonemic orthography is an orthography (system for writing a language) in which the graphemes (written symbols) correspond to the phonemes (significant spoken sounds) of the language. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is.
Despite the various English dialects spoken from country to country and within different regions of the same country, there are only slight regional variations in English orthography, the two most notable variations being British and American spelling. Many of the differences between American and British English / Commonwealth English date back to a time before spelling standards were developed. For instance, some spellings seen as "American" today were once commonly used in Britain, and some spellings seen as "British" were once commonly used in the United States.
Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes (writing system) to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element. Spellings originated as transcriptions of the sounds of spoken language according to the alphabetic principle.
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