So English spelling is in the dock once again. This time it's students who write “thier”, “ignor” and “arguement” (and obviously don't know how to use a spell checker). The solution? According to Ken Smith, an academic at Bucks New University, we should now tolerate variant spellings. Students are now incapable of learning the spellings of “their” and “truly” that countless millions have mastered over the centuries. So let's change our attitudes to spelling to help this deserving minority.

Two important things are left out of this argument. One is that English spelling does have a system. The silent “e” in “tone” shows that the preceding “o” is long; the lack of “e” in “ton” show the “o” is short.

And so on with all the other vowels: “Dane/Dan”, “pin/pine” etc. (The exception is TV commercials for Danone that pronounce the name to rhyme with “salmon” in breach of the silent “e” rule.) If we allowed odd variants like “ignor/ignore”, this would obscure the silent “e” system in English. Better to teach people the real rules of English spelling, not folk myths about “i” before “e”, which at best affects 11 common words.

The real advantage of a sound-based system like English is indeed that anything can be read aloud - as newsreaders demonstrate with foreign names, such as Solzhenitsyn and Pervez Musharraf in the past couple of days. As the system has been around for centuries, it has stuck with various anomalies, like the 11 ways of saying “a” - “age”, “bad”, “bath”, “about”, “beat”, “many”, “aisle”, “coat”, “ball”, “beauty” and “cauliflower”. The only languages that don't have such problems are those with “shallow” spelling systems that were standardised comparatively recently, such as Finnish.

English is called a “deep” spelling system because of rules like silent “e” and because it treats words as wholes. When we're reading silently, we don't read words like “the” and “of” letter by letter; we recognise them as wholes, just as we recognise a Nike swoosh or McDonald's golden arches. We go straight from the whole word to its meaning without passing through the sounds. We recognise the two hundred or so most frequent words of English as shapes - and we couldn't read silently at speed if we didn't. But reading whole words also applies to the famous oddities like “lieutenant” and “yacht”: we store them as one-offs and don't work out their pronunciation letter by letter.

If we made the spelling of “they're”, “there” and “their” interchangeable, we would be ignoring all the aspects of English writing other than sounds. The three forms fit into sentences in very different ways; the difference in spelling helps us to see the structure of the sentence.

Spelling makes distinctions that are impossible in speech, such as “whole” versus “hole” or “beech” versus “beach”. Reducing writing to a pale shadow of speech is impoverishing the English language.

There's nothing very unusual about using whole words: it's how Chinese works. Speakers of the different Chinese dialects can understand each other in writing even if they have different words for the same character. An educated Chinese speaker knows about 5,000 characters; a dictionary has 40,000. Surely we can manage a few hundred unique words in English? Memorising the spelling of the hundred most common words of English would mean that you spelt at least 45 per cent of the words correctly in any piece of typical writing, quite a useful start.

The panel (above right) shows some of the words that English-speakers are most likely to get wrong, the variants that people produce and the percentage of web pages that get them wrong. Would accepting all these variants make life easier?

One type of variation is between styles of spelling. Look up “judgment” or “minuscule” and the preferred spelling varies between North American and British dictionaries and from publisher to publisher. It's a matter of identity; use “color” and you're American, use “colour” and you're British.

The most common type concerns the consonant doubling rules of English - “embarrass”, “accommodate”, “desiccate”.

“Supersede” and “definitely” are probably examples of one-offs where you have to remember the word as a unique whole.

Before adopting greater tolerance to spelling, we need to take many factors into consideration, not just how letters go with sounds. And we need to take far more people into consideration than UK students.

The majority of people using English in the world are not native speakers and live outside English-speaking countries. Any change will have to take their needs into account, in particular the need for a consistent spelling system with constant word forms rather than something based on native speakers' pronunciation and characteristic spelling mistakes.

Vivian Cook is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University and author of Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary (Profile Books)

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