Why, Historically, do Americans spell words like colour, honour, without a "u"?

Question

In every English speaking region (Canada, Australia, New Zeland, India, South Africia Ireland, UK), these words (honour, colour, armour, valour, odour, etc...) are spelled correctly. Why does America insist on spelling them wrong?

Answer 1

to p**s off England after their independance

Answer 2

I think your approach on this issue is culturally biased and insensitive. Accept cultural differences. Embrace them. Americans don't spell certain words "incorrectly," they spell them DIFFERENTLY. People in the UK don't drive on the 'wrong' side of the road, they drive on the LEFT side.

By the way, how do you spell "Brazil" in your country? Here in BRASIL we spell it BRASIL. Are Brasileiros spelling the name of their own country incorrectly??

Answer 3

Webster and Co. simplified your spelling some two centuries ago

Answer 4

Because we pronounce it without the u. we pronounce it Color not Colour. So we changed the spelling to match  the pronunciation.

Answer 5

we don't speak proper english so why should we spell correctly either. we'll all be speaking spanish before you know it

Answer 6

I think it was a political device, as it did happen around the century America was a fledgling rebel country.

Had American scholars been serious about a 'phonetic' spelling reform they would have changed many many words in English. The small change of 'our' to 'or' would have only been the beginning. The prime example of a word that needs to change would be 'one' should be 'wun'.

Had this happened, it would have placed the American population at a clear disadvantage. European scholars would be able to read the texts of America without too much difficulty, as it would all be phonetic, whereas American people would be essentially locked out of all English literature from the past and Europe (which was the business and science centre of the world at the time). This would have led to America being severely disadvantaged and essentially remove the economic 'boost' they had from speaking English.

On the otherhand, the government needed to do something to make the population feel like it owned a unique and 'superior' brand of its language. What better way to do this than 'updating' the spelling just enough to make people feel like they had the new modern version, and leaving it intact enough to allow mutual interpretation.

So that is why the American spelling reforms occurred. It was all due to the politics of the day, not a push to update English.

Any real update of our spelling system now would have to change such a convoluted system that we'd lock ourselves from the massive array of books already in print in English. The conversion of hundreds of years of documents from across the ages would probably take more time than it would to teach kids to spell properly.

I hope you found this interesting. I sure do ;P

Answer 7

The real reason is almost exactly what jake said: after independence, the Americans changed some aspects of their language (some pronunciations and spellings) so that they won't be regarded as "British people", hence getting out of the British cultural dominance too.

PS. we only study and describe different languages and accents, and not judge them. So, "correct vs incorrect" or "right vs wrong" are out of the matter in language study.