Spelling norms, as any papyrologist or epigraphist will tell you, are a relatively new development in human language history.

In British English, spelling conventions emerged out of the needs of printers and readers. Different publishers have developed slightly different solutions to these needs over the years.

Despite this apparently liberal approach to orthography, in the early 1960s, I still had to endure corporal punishment for spelling a word ‘wrong’ at school, and was eventually lauded, when I mastered the bizarre ‘rules’ by rote from a book and excelled in exams. I was six years old.

British English has its own ecosystem of fiercely defended tribal spelling rules, which vary from one institution to another. A whole caste of copy editors has made a living for itself, doing due obeisance to the cherished norms of the institution to which they are allied and questioning those of others.

In the United States, a different ethos prevails. Noah Webster, a 19^th century lexicographer, suggested a spelling reform, which has been largely accepted by all sectors of society, to the point where it has become the fixed norm. Webster viewed this reform as just a modest first stage in an ongoing simplification and phoneticization of spelling rules. The second much more radical stage was cut short by his death and by forces resistant to too rapid social change. Webster’s phase II has nevertheless filtered down into the popular psyche and ‘nite’ for ‘night’ and ‘thru’ for ‘through’ are still commonly seen on street signs.

Neo-Latin languages have traditionally been very fussy about spelling rules. It is a way of both emphasizing their Imperial Roman pedigree and of establishing their prestige as major languages in their own right. The arcane French spelling system, which bears no relation whatsoever to phonetics, is a little Latin lesson constantly tugging away at the otherwise Barbarian-leaning Gallic soul. The abolition of the circumflex accent—one marker of an original Latin S—spurred by a new passion for European Union norms and a desire for digital simplicity, was widely criticized and is largely ignored.

Similar attempts to remove the tilde from official EU Spanish likewise failed.

Portuguese is a much more complex case. The language has evolved over time a system of accents, similar to those of French, which not only distinguish the exact sound of the vowel (necessary, since Portuguese has seven vowels compared to Latin’s five) but also indicate the main stressed syllable in a word. The case of Portuguese is compounded by the fact that—like British and US spelling conventions—the orthography current in Portugal and its colonies and in Brazil rapidly diverged. This is further compounded by the fact that neither Portugal nor Brazil is a country that enjoys much economic, military or cultural heft in the modern world.

As a result, Portuguese has gone through a series of international committee-devised authoritarian but contested spelling reforms, the most recent in 2009.

K and Y are not considered letters of the Portuguese alphabet in certain circles, even though they appear everywhere in everyday life. A great poet once bemoaned the decreed loss of y… “Abismo” means nothing, he argued, the very shape of “abysmo” already suggests plumbing the abyss. More recently another poet has bemoaned the loss in the most recent spelling reform of the circumflex on the first o in the word “vôo” (meaning flight). The diacritic hovers over the word, like a UFO, lifting it up. “Voo” is an impoverishment, more start-up brand name than real word.

Online chat and text messaging have brought a whole new range of spelling deviancies and new norms. We are oscillating these days between ‘u’ and ‘you,’ ‘4’ and ‘for’, ‘2’ and ‘to’. The former could be seen by some as sloppy and lazy, whilst many regard the latter as fussy, patronizing and wasteful of precious microseconds of keyboard time.

The vogue for and convenience of brevity have created a whole new communications etiquette. Recent studies have found that recipients of short functional courtesy text messages that are ended with a full stop view them as rude.

As with all aspects of language, in the case of spelling, the opinion of a majority of language consumers almost always prevails in the end, however rigorously reforms or protection orders are enforced by supposed authorities.

Spelling thus tells us something about the character of a nation. Brits like a wide range of choices. In the US, people largely accepted the Webster norms, because of their rationality and simplicity, even though they were under no obligation to do so, but balked at more radical reforms. The French-speaking public rejects excessively radical and over-conservative linguistic diktats alike, resisting the removal of the circumflex but welcoming Anglicisms. In the Lusophone world, imperfect rules handed down from on high are grudgingly accepted in a manner tinged with nostalgia and certainty that there will soon be another round of new regulations.