Spelling reform

There are various goals which may drive such reforms: facilitating literacy and international communication, making etymology clearer, or for aesthetic or political reasons.

Reform efforts are further hampered by habit and, for many languages, a lack of a central authority to set new spelling standards.

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.

One of the difficulties in introducing a spelling reform is how to reflect different pronunciations, often linked to regions or classes.

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.

Diacritic marks and use of new letter shapes like Ʒʒ have also formed part of spelling reform proposals.

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.

In summer 2004, various newspapers and magazines returned to the old spelling, and in March 2006, the most controversial changes of Rechtschreibreform were reverted.

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.

The medieval spelling of Portuguese was mostly phonemic, but, from the Renaissance on, many authors who admired classical culture began to use an etymological orthography.

However, spelling reforms in Portugal (1911) and Brazil (1943) reverted the orthography to phonemic principles (with some etymological distinctions maintained).

The goal of unifying the spelling was finally achieved with a multi-lateral agreement in 1990, signed by every Portuguese-speaking country, but not ratified by Angola as of 2014.

They mostly involved the elimination of the (purely etymological) Greek letters that had been retained in the Cyrillic script by reason of ecclesiastical tradition, and those rendered obsolete by changes in phonetics.

When Peter I introduced his "civil script" (гражданский шрифт, graždanskij šrift) in 1708, based on more Western-looking letter shapes, spelling was simplified as well.

The Russian orthography was simplified by eliminating four obsolete letters (ѣ, і, ѵ, and ѳ) and the archaic usage of the letter ъ (called yer, or hard sign) at the ends of words, which had originally represented a vowel with a sound similar to schwa, but had become silent by the Middle Ages.

Western dialects had been written using the Latin alphabet, while eastern (Serbian) had been using an archaic form of the Cyrillic script.

Despite many attempts, there was no universally agreed-upon spelling standard employing the Latin alphabet, and the Cyrillic version was considered outdated.

A series of reforms have been undertaken to set the standards, in order to bring the writing system to parity with spoken language.

The reform efforts were coordinated in order to correlate the two writing systems, culminating in the Vienna Literary Agreement which has remained in service since.

Another initiative, the Rational Phonetic Hispanoamerican Orthography (Ortografía Fonética Rasional Ispanoamericana), remained a curiosity.