Are there modern languages without standardized spelling? If not, why?

Question

Historically, English did not have standardized spelling; see e.g. this paragraph from the Washington Post:

At one point, English speakers lived in a world without standardized spelling. According to the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English, in the late Middle Ages a word such as “through” could have as many as 500 variant forms, from recognizable formulations such as “thurgh” and “thorough” to more inventive combinations such as “orowe,” “drowg,” “trghug” and “trowffe.” There were pecuniary reasons to use inventive spellings: Lawyers’ clerks were often paid by the inch, and they added superfluous letters to words to pad the bill. Typesetters, on the other hand, might spell the same word several different ways in the same text to save space. Source

The article goes on to explain that there were attempts to standardize English spelling from as early as the fifteenth century. Nowadays English spelling is almost entirely standardized (within versions like British English, American English etc.) except for very few words, and even in those cases (e.g. focused, focussed) writers aim to be consistent within a given document. The same is true for the other modern languages I'm aware of.

Are there any modern languages which are written down but without standardized spelling, as English was in the paragraph above? A user of such a language could validly write down a sentence in multiple ways which could be correctly read and understood as the same sentence (without one version being 'better writing', 'more correct' or anything similar), and the same word might be spelled in different ways within a text.

If there are no, or vanishingly few, such modern languages, what factors lead to this being the case? I can imagine some causes (especially technology and the desirability of computer search functions, but this is a very recent consideration) but I am interested in a wider global-historical linguistic view.

Answer 1

First, let's define our terms. Spelling is "standardized" if there's some authority that people listen to on the topic. This can be a government agency, like the Académie Française, or a private entity, like Webster's dictionary or Microsoft Word's spell-checker. (Even now, English spelling has several competing standards: is it "thru" or "through"? "worshiped" or "worshipped"? "color" or "colour"?)

With this definition, I'd say a good percentage of languages lack this standardization. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, there are far more languages than language-regulating groups. New phones may come with Swahili spell-checkers, but as far as I know, nobody's created such a thing for Kikongo or Kituba, and while linguists might use letters like ɛ and ɔ combined with various tone diacritics, most keyboards can't type those and people will find other ways to make do (e.g. using è for ɛ in French-influenced areas).

In other places, we see a similar lack of standardization for indigenous and minority languages. While Standard Italian has official rules for spelling, there's less standardization around, say, Veneto. If your dialect has a /θ/ phoneme, the rules of Standard Italian won't tell you how to write it. Or if you're a speaker of Oneida, which until recently was much more commonly taught in homes than in schools, you may never have learned the orthographic standards linguists have invented. Even if a standard technically exists, it doesn't mean much if the native speakers aren't using it.

Answer 2

As Katai has pointed out in the comments Swiss German is a modern langauge that has no standardised spelling. In "Mundartwörterbüchern"(=Dialect dictionaries) one can see two different ideas of how to spell. Either a phonetic way or one that is close to the Standard German spelling. Either way it is not standardised and in day to day life people tend to write whatever they are comfortable with ("Nach Gefühl" = By instinct).

This (in part) is why Swiss German is not an official language of Switzerland. People are taught Standard German in school and official correspondence is always in Standard German.

Answer 3

It depends on what you mean by "standardized", also "are written down". In Logoori (a Bantu language of Kenya), there are multiple observed spelling practices, but they can generally be related to some specific standard: the first Bible translation of the '20s, the 1967 Bible translation, a booklet promulgated by the "Orthography Committee" which had some relation to the colonial government, and the "Swahili model" which is to "make it look like Swahili". In each case, a spelling choice is made by reference to a standard (either a specific book, the rules of a book, or the rules of spelling of another language) – there are at least 4 standards.

I cannot think of a clear contemporary case where a language is in fact systematically written, but where people randomly make up all of the spelling conventions. I would exclude many languages of Tanzania (and elsewhere) which are only un-systematically written, e.g. a Matumbi speaker might write a letter in Matumbi to another Matumbi speaker, but even then they will follow the "Swahili standard" where you ignore features not present in Swahili and otherwise write /b/ as <b> as you do in Swahili.

Any human language can in principle be written down, but many languages are not in fact habitually written down – Sentinelese is not written down (at all, as far as we know). Without a much narrower definition of "standardized", I think there is a contradiction between "is written" (not just potentially of sporadically) and "follows no standard".

Answer 4

Serbo-Croatian. The Serbo-Croatian language only has the convention that writing is phonetic and so you "write the way you speak". That is, each letter corresponds to precisely one sound and each sound corresponds to precisely one letter.

Combined with regional speech variations, this results in all regional accents being represented directly in writing. So people from different cities who have slight differences in how they pronounce words carry over those same differences to their writing. For example, the adverb meaning "beautifully" can be spelled in at least the following three different ways by different people: "lepo", "ljepo", "lijepo".

Answer 5

Occitan has two main accepted orthographies, the Provencal standard and Languedocien. In the Middle Ages the situation was similar to English and French of the era with a wide variation in regional spellings, and personal idiolects mixing different forms.

There has been some standardisation based on different spellings. The Provencal form was used across a broader region during the revival of the late 1800s but now is only used in Provence itself, and the standard 'classic' spellings are based on the dialect of Languedoc with a strong influence of medieval spelling.

Other sub dialects exist but they tend to be separate and have either internally consistent spelling or a couple of accepted variants for each word. The borders of different dialectical features were mapped pretty thoroughly in the 19th C and that killed a lot of the personal idiolects. Gascon remains visibly different, often includes archaic spellings and has more accepted variants, but is still far from being free-spelt.

If a language is reasonably well used (in written form), there will have been some attempts at standardisation. Languages considered purely 'dialects' - like the examples other people have given, or Franco-Provencal, are less likely to have this. They are also less likely to have extensive written literature from the last few centuries and so on. A possible exception is Scots English.

The other point is that many people will use a variable spoken dialect but will write in a standardised from - you can blame universal schooling for this. In IPA the different English dialects are wildly different but everyone uses classic spelling (except in error). For first languages, or languages with pretensions to be one, there will be only more and more standardisation since 1800ish. Few places would approve a curriculum where you can use multiple spellings of the same word, and word processing will only add nails to the coffin.

Answer 6

Yiddish... if you call it a language.

Answer 7

The Scots language has a variety of orthographic standards based upon historical dialects, with standardization attempts ongoing among Scots-speaking communities. Since there is already a substantial, established written Scots literary canon, it is questionable whether these efforts are likely to be successful. At the time English was being standardized, it was still developing its literary canon.

Answer 8

Western Abanaki in Northern New England and parts of Québec has no standardized spelling; however, work is currently being done to more or less standardize it. The reason is simply because until fairly recently in history, it was a spoken language only. The word for 'friend' (literally "my friend") for example can be written as either 'nidôba' or 'nid8ba'. The word for large/big can be either 'geci', 'kechi', 'kchi' - the 'e' is the 'schwa' sound and it's not always written.

Answer 9

I see folks pointing out that, to answer productively, we need to define our terms, such as "what do we mean by standardized, and what do we mean by written down".

I think there's another question we must ask to clarify the problem space for this question-and-answer thread:

• What is the point of writing? What is the use case or purpose?

This might seem silly, or overly broad. Specifically what I'm driving at is, are we talking about "spelling" to capture the sound of the word, or to capture the meaning?

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My background is working in and with the Japanese language, and to a related but lesser extent, Chinese.

Written Chinese is widely described as logographic, where individual graphemes convey meaning more than sound. This allows for a very flexible relationship between text and speech, to the extent that (at least some) Chinese poems from 2,000 years ago still make sense and still work as poetry, despite substantial changes in spoken Chinese during the intervening years.

That flexibility allows folks in China to read and write across linguistic boundaries, such that someone who grew up speaking only Mandarin can still carry on a written correspondence with a Cantonese speaker. This flexibility also means that, to a more limited extent, folks from China can still get around in Japan, and vice versa, despite Chinese and Japanese being completely different languages, with wholly unrelated grammars, and large chunks of unrelated vocabulary. In effect, the written language becomes a shared context separate from the spoken language.

For alphabetic / abjadic / abugidic writing systems, meanwhile, the individual graphemes record sound more than meaning. This kind of default tighter coupling to phonetics necessarily leads to one of two approaches in writing, which we see reflected to some degree in all of the examples brought up so far in this thread:

• Writers focus on the spoken forms, and spellings change as pronunciations change -- be it due to the passage of time, or to differences in sociolect. ** We see this in English up through at least Middle English. Chaucer's knyght was pronounced basically as written, as /kniːçt/.
• Writers opt instead to focus on the written forms, and spellings remain the same even as pronunciations change. ** We see this in English since some time after Shakespeare. Chaucer's /kniːçt/ became /naɪt/ instead, but the written form preserved the now-silent ⟨k⟩ and ⟨gh⟩.

English might be a bit of an outlier for alphabetic languages, where the individual graphemes have lost their phonetic values when appearing in specific contexts. One could argue that the meaningful graphemic unit has shifted in some cases from the letter to the entire word -- perhaps making English's oddball spelling closer in some respects to logographic Chinese, and similarly allowing for mutually intelligible written correspondence even across mutually unintelligible differences in pronunciation -- becoming a shared context separate from the spoken language.

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To loop back to the OP's question:

Are there any modern languages which are written down but without standardized spelling?

We also need to define what do we mean when we say "language"? Are we referring solely to the written form, where such exists? Or are we referring to the spoken form? Many of the spelling variations mentioned by earlier posters in this thread arise from variations in pronunciation. Where do we draw the line between "language" and "dialect"? The "variations" seen here might well be internally consistent enough to call "standardized", and are only cast as "variations" due to the sociopolitical status of different speech communities within the shared polity that contains them.

Just within the US, any attempt at expressing vernacular speech in writing would be cast as a "variation" or "non-standard". Just look at web postings for a smattering of these.

From this perspective (the indefinability of "language" versus "dialect", and what is "standard"), the answer to the OP's question is arguably, "all of them". 😄