English enjoys widespread use throughout the world, and is an international means of communication in politics and commerce. It is the native tongue of over 375 million persons in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is also the official language of Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Dominica, Barbados, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands, shares official status with other languages in Tanzania, Cameroon, South Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, Western Samoa, Kiribati, India, and Pakistan, is either the native tongue, a second language, or simply co-existent with a native tongue in such areas as Anguila, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Ascension Island, Bangladesh, Belize, Bermuda, Botswana, Indian Ocean Territory, the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands, the Cook Islands, Cypress, Ethiopia, the Falkland Islands, Gambia, Grenada, Guyana, Honduras, Hong Kong, the Isle of Man, Israel, Kenya, Kirbati, Kuwait, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, the Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Montserrat, Namibia, Naura, Nepal, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Qatar, St. Christopher and Nevis, St. Helena, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Surinam, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Tristan da Cunha, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, the Virgin Islands (British), the Virgin Islands (American), and Zambia. The language itself is powerful and easy to learn, but it's written form is so confusing that significant numbers of adults in English-speaking countries are unable to learn to read and write, and learners in other countries find it hard to know how words are pronounced. The scope of the problem is indicated by the fact that 47% of the adults in the United States and Canada are illiterate or functionally illiterate in spite of mandated education. That's unacceptable. But, it's understandable if we look back to see how Modern English developed, and why the oral language has drifted so far from its written form.

First language: The earliest inhabitants of the British Isles, the Picts, Scots, and Celts, spoke a language we now identify as Celtic, the language also spoken throughout Europe at the time. Celtic continued to be the language of the people in the British Isles throughout four centuries of the Roman occupation, with no significant borrowing from the Vulgate Latin of the invaders. But, when the Romans withdrew their armies and left the country vulnerable to the invasions of marauding Jutes, Frisians, Angles, and Saxons, who eventually took up residence and brought the Germanic dialects of the invaders became the language of the land, only those who were driven westward into Wales, and northward into Scotland continued to speak the Celtic tongue.

Once the Germanic tribes had settled in in their adopted country and were no longer fighting side by side against the natives, their speech began to diverge, as languages tend to do unless people remain in close touch. In the course of time their dialectical differences became so diverse that the inhabitants of Northumbria in the north were unable to make heads or tails of the language of the inhabitants of Kent and Saxony in the south, and vice versa, although both were able to converse intelligently with the Mercians who occupied the territory between them.

First scripts: In the period between the departure of the Roman armies and the invasion of the Danes in the ninth century, Christianity and the rudiments of literacy came to England. Until the end of the 6th century, the Anglo-Saxon tongue had no written form of any note; a few runes on tablets and in poems, but little else. Then, St. Augustine brought to the southern part of England a group of monks who were given the task of representing the local speech so that clerics could read litanies to Christian converts in the Anglo-Saxon language. Schooled in Latin and Greek, the monks used the Latin alphabet as a basis for the alphabet, adding two Greek letters to represent the two speech sounds we now represent with the th, two ligatures to isolate the vowel sounds of the a's in /hat/, and /bad/, et al, and the dipthongs ea, eo, and ei to cover speech sounds the Latin characters did not adequately represent. Vowel symbols were allowed to represent both long and short vowel speech sounds, with the difference distinguished between by extending their duration in speech, and by marking the vowel symbols with accents in texts. All consonants were pronounced in the language that in time became known as Old English.

The Danish influence: The Danes invaded the country toward the end of the 8th century, bringing the Danish tongue, a descendant of Old Norse, to the eastern and northern parts of England. When the Danes tried to take over the country, the fighting between the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons raged up and down the country for twenty-five years, ending only after a significant Anglo-Saxon victory at Athelney in 878 A.D. (Other sources say the site was Edington or Ethandune.) The treaty that ended the fighting split the country along a line running roughly from London northwesterly to Chester. North of that line, the Danelaw was ruled by the Danes, while the Anglo-Saxons maintained a somewhat tenuous rule over the lands to the south.

During the peaceful coexistence that followed the Anglo-Saxon victory, Alfred the Great set about restoring monasteries and building schools, and was responsible for the use of Old English rather than Latin for the education of his people. In the ensuing years of relative peace, a great many Anglo-Saxon words drifted into the speech of those in the north while equal numbers of Norse words drifted south. More importantly, Old English began to change perceptibly. Influenced by the Norse orthography, it began dropping many of the inflections of the Germanic tongue. The Anglicization of the language had begun.

The next influence on the language came following another invasion, and the Norman conquest of the Anglo-Saxons. The Normans brought their version of French to Britain, and imposed it in the court and in government circles, while the peasantry continued to use the Anglo-Saxon tongue (Old English), by now infused with Norse words, and having taken on the simpler forms of the Norse language.

For some time, three languages vied for superiority in England, Latin, French, and English. English won out in the long run, aided by the propensity of the Norman lords to use English help, to intermarry with English maidens, and by their being forced to deal with English tradespeople. By the middle of the 13th century, English had become the language of the land, and had begun its ascension from Old English to Middle English, and on to Modern English.

The Norman influence: In the 11th century the French-speaking Normans invaded England, defeated the Anglo-Saxons, and became the ruling class of England. Norman French, which differed significantly from Parisian French, became both the official language, and the language of the nobility, while Old English remained the language of the working classes. During the period of Norman rule, great numbers of French words found their way into the English language, often taking their place alongside Old English words with similar or identical meanings.

Old English, with its strong hold on the working class, was used familiarly in the households of Normans who relied on Anglo-Saxon servants or had wed Anglo-Saxon maidens. Its usage in the Norman households reached a point where the Normans became frightened that their French heritage might be lost, and demanded that French be taught in the schools of England. The indirect effect was that French was taught as a foreign tongue, and has remained a foreign tongue since.

While Old English had done a fairly decent job of representing English speech, by the end of the eleventh century Middle English had taken over and remained the mode of speech until superseded by Modern English in the 16th century. Middle English did a poorer job of representing English speech than Old English had, and Modern English was no better.

By the middle of the fourteenth century, literacy, once the sole province of the church, had become a measure of the educated nobleman or woman. A widespread demand for texts spawned the development of scriptoriums wherein literary works were copied and then 'published;' one of the major concerns of publishers being that the spellings used often reflected the personal whims of the scribe doing the transcription. Afraid that they'd be thought ignorant by publishing works that included 'improper' spellings, each publisher tended to adopt and demand what he thought were the proper spellings. A feeling that that wasn't enough and that a more universal form of standardization than the publisher's personal preferences was needed was accelerated by the invention and widespread use of the printing press, which made publishing a major enterprise.

Standardization: Efforts to standardize the English spellings were generally unfruitful until in 1611 the very popular King James version of the Bible became the de facto standard. It's spellings remained the accepted standard until in 1755 Dr. Samuel Johnson published his magnum opus. Assembled over a period of nine years, and based principally on current usage, Johnson's Dictionary filled two volumes and instantly became a landmark publication. However logical it may have seemed at the time, standardizing spellings on the basis of current usage was a serious mistake, in that it embraced all the existing flaws in the system. We're still suffering from that error.

The next great influence on the English language was its Americanization, ardently promoted by Noah Webster. Intensely patriotic, Webster sought to isolate the American English from the British English, assuming that in time it might become an entirely different tongue. Although fostering many simplifications and changes in the spellings established by Johnson, Webster retreated from his innovative stand due to opposition to change among readers, and in order to remain competitive with other publishers. First published in 1855, Webster's, as it is affectionately called, remains the standard in the United States.

At about the same time that Webster's was initially published, the Philological Society in England passed resolutions to create a new dictionary. Initiated in 1858 and in preparation for over 70 years, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). was published a piece at a time. The first segment, a-ant was published in 1884, the complete works, consisting of 12 volumes, not until 1928. The initial publication covered 414,825 words. The second edition, published in 1989 had 21,728 pages, 290,500 main entries, and occupies 20 volumes. A CD-ROM version appeared in 1992. The principle basis of word spellings remained usage, and the spellings pretty much remained Johnson's.

Because the English spellings are based on usage rather than speech sounds, English dictionaries have had to incorporate pronunciation guides for each entry, often using special characters to represent speech sounds. The use of pronunciation guides could have been avoided had each symbol uniquely represented a single distinct speech sound, and the goal of the emendment process is to reach that point, or come as close to it as we can.

Dialectical differences: As was indicated above, the English langage is currently used in widely separated areas of the world. As languages are wont to do, local areas have developed their own speech habits; different accents, grammar, vocabulary, and idiom. This can be a big problem for us, or a little one, depending on how we approach it. The most straightforward approach is to recognize that there are differences and incorporate them within an omnibus lexicon. This approach requires a coordinated effort with teams of experts from each of the areas that must sign off on the final product, which the English speaking community does not have. An laternative is the development of an orthography for a limited area, to which dialectical differences may be added as they are uncovered. This is the approach planned for the Inglish orthography, the limited area for the initial development being the western United States, since the author resides in the U.S., and the final product evolving over time.