The Dutch government legally controls the Dutch language, and I've been told that Dutch had three spelling reforms in the 20th Century. I think the French government could do the same for the French language if they wanted to, though I have no idea if they have done so. (I doubt it. The Dutch are very practical and see language as a tool. For the French, their language is more like a religion.)

The transition from Middle English to Modern English is generally dated to some time in the late 1600's, and Shakespeare is one of the first major writers in Modern English.

But English as a spoken language has continued to evolve since then, especially after it started to fork. The nation with the largest body of English speakers is India, it turns out, but for the majority of them English is a second language. No less than the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary declared a few years ago that the modern center of the English language was now in the US.

Everyone knows that English is long overdue for a spelling reform, but the problem is that no one can make that happen. Unlike Dutch, no single body has control. So the last significant spelling reform was in the middle of the 19th Century and was informal. It happened when American dictionary writers (like the famous Webster) decided some of the old spellings were ludicrous.

That's when plough became plow. That's when colour lost its "u". It was a unique moment when a small handful of linguistic radicals seized their opportunity. But those changes didn't propagate back to the UK, so in the Commonwealth the old spellings still dominate. I've despaired that English spelling will ever be rational again (if it ever was after the 15th century).

But it's happening now. And it's Twitter that's making it happen. Because of the 140-character stricture on a tweet, plus the sheer pain of entering text using a phone, an entirely new spelling reform is happening before our eyes.

Through has become thru. Hate has become h8. The real question is the extent to which these changes will percolate back out into real world usage, and how long it will take. My guess is "not very much" and "a very long time" but I have been known to be extremely wrong about things.

Anyway, it's interesting to watch it happening.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:08 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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