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Natural languages often develop cumbersome manners of spelling words. Particular sounds will be represented by various letter combinations, while one letter may be pronounced in various ways. This is especially true of languages such as English that borrow heavily from other languages.

Language reformers propose new systems of simplified spelling to make it more phonetic. They argue that this will make their language more useful for international communications and easier to learn for immigrants and school children. However, their efforts are faced with concerns that old literature will become inaccessible. Their efforts are further hampered by habit and a lack of a central authority to set new spelling standards.

The idea of phonetic spelling has faced more serious criticism, on the grounds that it would hide morphological similarities between words that happen to have quite different pronunciations. This line of argument is based on the idea that when people read, they do not in reality try to work out the sequence of sounds composing each word, but instead either recognize words as a whole, or as a sequence of small number of semantically significant units (e.g. "morphology" might be read as "morph"+"ology", rather than as a sequence of a larger number of phonemes). In a system of phonetic spelling, these semantic units become less distinct. For example, in English spelling, most past participles are spelled with an "ed" on the end, even though this can have several pronunciations (compare "kissed" and "interrupted").

Germany recently instituted spelling reforms.

See also: Alphabet
Esperanto
Cut Spelling