For centuries, many people have called for language reforms of English, which vary in approach from the radical (completely overhauling existing conventions) to the conservative (preserving most while removing irregularities).
Phonetic alphabets limited to English do not belong here. See Category:Phonetic alphabets.
Spelling reforms are attempts to regularize English spelling either by reducing the number of irregularities or by making it completely phonemic. This may be done using the existing basic English alphabet (basic), by extending it (extended) or by replacing it entirely (replaced). Such historical proposals include:
Name of work | Date completed | Creator(s) | Alphabet |
---|---|---|---|
A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language | 1806 | Noah Webster | Basic |
A Plea for Phonetic Spelling | 1848 | Alexander John Ellis | Extended |
Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet | 1768 | Benjamin Franklin | Extended |
Booke at Large for the Amendment of English Orthographie | 1580 | William Bullokar | Extended |
Cut Spelling | 1992 | Christopher Upward | Basic |
Deseret alphabet | 1847–1854 | Board of regents of the University of Deseret | Replaced |
The English Grammar | 1633 | Charles Butler | Extended |
Handbook of Simplified Spelling | 1920 | Simplified Spelling Board | Basic |
Interspel | 1986 | Valerie Yule | Extended |
Logonomia Anglica | 1619 | Alexander Gill | Extended |
Regularized Inglish | 1959 | Axel Wijk | Basic |
SaypU (Spell As You Pronounce Universally) | 2012 | Jaber George Jabbour | Extended |
Shavian alphabet (revised version: Quikscript) | 1960 | Ronald Kingsley Read | Replaced |
Simpel-Fonetik method of writing | 2012 | Allan Kiisk | Extended |
SoundSpel (previously Classic New Spelling, New Spelling, World English Spelling) | 1910–1986 | Various | Basic |
SR1 (Spelling Reform step 1) | 1969 | Harry Lindgren | Basic |
The Opening of the Unreasonable Writing of Our Inglish Toung | 1551 | John Hart | Extended |
Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR) | 2021 | Stephen Linstead | Basic |
Unifon | 1950s | John Malone | Extended |
Subsets are reforms that use a restricted wordlist and grammar. English subsets include:
Vocabulary reforms seek to reform English by changing or restricting its words without changing its grammar.
The Thai script is the abugida used to write Thai, Southern Thai and many other languages spoken in Thailand. The Thai script itself has 44 consonant symbols, 16 vowel symbols that combine into at least 32 vowel forms, four tone diacritics, and other diacritics.
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.
Spelling is a set of conventions for written language regarding how graphemes should correspond to the sounds of spoken language. Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.
The Turkish alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language. This alphabet represents modern Turkish pronunciation with a high degree of accuracy and specificity. Mandated in 1928 as part of Atatürk's Reforms, it is the current official alphabet and the latest in a series of distinct alphabets used in different eras.
Phonetic transcription is the visual representation of speech sounds by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Devanagari is an Indic script used for many Indo-Aryan languages of North India and Nepal, including Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, which was the script used to write Classical Sanskrit. There are several somewhat similar methods of transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script, including the influential and lossless IAST notation. Romanised Devanagari is also called Romanagari.
Filipinoorthography specifies the correct use of the writing system of the Filipino language, the national and co-official language of the Philippines.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. 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. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic.
The Polish alphabet is the script of the Polish language, the basis for the Polish system of orthography. It is based on the Latin alphabet but includes certain letters (9) with diacritics: the acute accent – kreska: ⟨ć, ń, ó, ś, ź⟩; the overdot – kropka: ⟨ż⟩; the tail or ogonek – ⟨ą, ę⟩; and the stroke – ⟨ł⟩. The letters ⟨q⟩, ⟨v⟩, and ⟨x⟩, which are used only in foreign words, are usually absent from the Polish alphabet. Additionally, before the standardization of Polish spelling, ⟨qu⟩ was sometimes used in place of ⟨kw⟩, and ⟨x⟩ in place of ⟨ks⟩.
Controlled natural languages (CNLs) are subsets of natural languages that are obtained by restricting the grammar and vocabulary in order to reduce or eliminate ambiguity and complexity. Traditionally, controlled languages fall into two major types: those that improve readability for human readers , and those that enable reliable automatic semantic analysis of the language.
In software, a spell checker is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.
For centuries, there have been movements to reform the spelling of the English language. Such spelling reform seeks to change English orthography so that it is more consistent, matches pronunciation better, and follows the alphabetic principle. Common motives for spelling reform include making learning quicker, making learning cheaper, and making English more useful as an international auxiliary language.
The Hong Kong Government uses an unpublished system of Romanisation of Cantonese for public purposes which is based on the 1888 standard described by Roy T Cowles in 1914 as Standard Romanisation. The primary need for Romanisation of Cantonese by the Hong Kong Government is in the assigning of names to new streets and places. It has not formally or publicly disclosed its method for determining the appropriate Romanisation in any given instance.
In linguistics and social sciences, markedness is the state of standing out as nontypical or divergent as opposed to regular or common. In a marked–unmarked relation, one term of an opposition is the broader, dominant one. The dominant default or minimum-effort form is known as unmarked; the other, secondary one is marked. In other words, markedness involves the characterization of a "normal" linguistic unit against one or more of its possible "irregular" forms.
Benjamin Franklin's phonetic alphabet was Benjamin Franklin's proposal for a spelling reform of the English language. The alphabet was based on the Latin alphabet used in English, though with several additional letters that Franklin newly invented.
The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Greek alphabet was altered by the Etruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was altered by the Ancient Romans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
Romanisation of Bengali is the representation of written Bengali language in the Latin script. Various romanisation systems for Bengali are used, most of which do not perfectly represent Bengali pronunciation. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, none has been adopted with the same degree of uniformity as Japanese or Sanskrit.
Interspel, or International English Spelling, is a set of principles introduced by Valerie Yule that aims to address the unpredictability and inconsistency of present English spelling, while preserving its heritage of print through minimal changes in appearance.
Lojban is a logical, constructed, human language created by the Logical Language Group which aims to be syntactically unambiguous. It succeeds the Loglan project.
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the current English alphabet. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern Latin alphabet. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order.