AHC Make American English an Independent Language!

If Teddy Roosevelt's spelling reforms stick, Queen's English and American English would look very different in writing, perhaps enough to create a sense that they were really different, though closely related, languages.

Have Americans standardize English spelling based on phonology.

The short essay "Meihem in Ce Klasrum" (Mayhem in the Classroom) is an example of how standardizing English spelling could change the English language. As the essay progress, it slowly changes out the letters used for their "new" spellings. At the end of the essay, what would originally be:

"Even, Mr. Shaw, we believe, would be happy in the knowledge that his dreams finally came true" becomes:

"Even Mr. Yaw, wi beliv, wud be hapi in ce noleg cat his drims fainali keim tru."

In this language, Y = SH, C = TH, and other changes in the language in order to simplify spelling. It's easily readable, once you learn the spelling conventions. I think if this type of reform was carried out, American English would be thought as a different language from British English.
 
Problem is that language is just dialect with army and navy, it's more political than linguistic question what is language-difference between Serbian and Croatian is smaller than between American and British English (except for alphabet), but they are considered as separate languages, while two main Chinese dialects-Cantonese and Mandarin are different enough to be seen as languages.

Actually, all you need is for the us to declare its speech a separate language.

That would require a massive break with england, but if andrew jacksons spellings and usages caught on, it COULD be almost as different as Afrikaans from Dutch.

That's exactly it. What defines what is a language, or a dialect, or even an accent, is politics. Arabic and Chinese dialects are much less intelligible than some of the self-proclaimed European languages, e.g. Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc.

As a matter of fact, I think that the Andrew Jackson's ortography would be a nice start of a new language. One of the libertadores of Latin America tried the same (google Andrés Bello) but his spelling rules were only put in practice in Chile just to sadly turned back to the Real Academia rules in the early 1900's.
 
The problem with phonetic spelling reform is that it requires there to be a single phonology. For the the rest of speakers of the language, its just another set of arbitrary conventions, really.

Bronx vs bostonian vs north carolinian vs backcountry appalachian...
 
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