Why Is English So Hard To Spell?

If there’s one complaint that’s nearly universal between native English speakers and those learning English, it’s that the English language is incredibly difficult to spell. Why else would there be a spelling bee?

A lot of this difficulty can be attributed to the fact that English doesn’t have consistent phonetic rules. It's not a purely phonetic language, meaning the way a word is spelled doesn't always directly correspond to how it's pronounced. This leads to many exceptions and irregularities, making it challenging for both native and non-native speakers. This happens because English isn’t just English when it comes to linguistic origin: it is a constantly evolving blend of multicultural and historical influences, and phonetic inconsistencies.

Why is this the case? It’s because of a phenomenon called language contact. Close interaction between speakers of different languages can lead to the borrowing of words, grammatical structures, and pronunciation features, including the creation regional variations and dialects. This contact can occur through various social interactions, including migration, trade, colonization, and increased mobility of speakers. 

When languages come into contact, it's common for speakers to adopt elements from each other's languages. This can include individual words (known as loanwords), word-for-word translations of words/phrases (calques), or even patterns of grammar and pronunciation. English has borrowed countless words from French, Latin, Arabic and many other languages throughout its history. 

Language contact can also lead to the development of distinct dialects as different communities adapt and integrate borrowed elements into speaking their own language. These dialects often reflect the specific linguistic influences and social contexts of their speakers. In some situations of intensely concentrated and/or constant language contact, such as trade or colonization, new languages called pidgins and creoles can emerge. Pidgins are simplified languages used for communication between speakers of different languages, while creoles are pidgins that have become the native language of a community. English has influenced the formation of numerous pidgins and creoles around the world, and some of them (like Haitian Creole) do the same for the English language itself in turn.

The degree and type of language contact can vary depending on social factors like migration patterns, trade routes, and power dynamics between language groups. These factors shape the specific linguistic outcomes of language contact.

Why is this relevant to spelling? Because English continues to consistently absorb words from other languages to use in its own lexicon, a process previously accelerated by global interactions and now by the internet. This is not a new phenomenon; English has a long history of borrowing from languages like French, Latin, and Norse. Examples include words like "sushi" (Japanese), "karaoke" (Japanese), and "algorithm" (Arabic). 

These words become integral parts of the English vocabulary, and, in studying their origin and their “journey” through language contact, students of orthography can utilize patterns that characterize words from certain languages in English to try and decipher correct spellings even if they don’t know the word itself. For example, understanding that “ph” as a spelling for the “f” sound is a lot more common in Greek than it is in Latin, which tends to be spelled with just an “f.” Upon encountering a word that they don’t know with that sound, a speller who understands language contact and the resulting effect on spelling patterns in English would be able to use the knowledge that it comes from Latin in a productive way to identify how the word is spelled.