This pessimism will be looked at carefully. The design of English spelling is a new, wide and still almost empty field for empirical research. Spelling is far more important to our social fabric than is generally realised. But spelling means more than that in society. Orthographic change in any society is related to social change .
Writing systems have a function in maintaining or changing social structure.
They are an element of control in education. International written English has a significance we ignore to our detriment today. Bound up with our spelling are the possibilities of democracy, philosophies of liberty and equality, our concepts of education, and the distribution of labour in our economic system. The options already open for how language can be written down . We can see how orthographies tend to be adapted to the languages they represent - but curiously, most of them manage to fail to be ideal matches, if not in one way, then in another.