There are TONS in Welsh, because it is acceptable to spell your dialect’s words phonetically. From the book open in front of me right now:
sgŵl / scŵl (this is “school” in Welsh spelling, but the novel uses both forms as well as the Welsh ysgol). llwybyr / llwybr “path” dod / dŵad “come” (again, both used in the book—formal dyfod isn’t used, at least not yet—I’m only on p. 13) ia / ie “yes”
Dictionaries will sometimes list multiple forms, sometimes not, especially if it’s just a common dialectal sound change. Some dictionaries list only dyfod, some only dod.
This example of variations of doubled letters makes me think of certain city names shared between countries. I once compiled a list of city names where an American city was named for a foreign one. Sometimes the names were the same except for doubled/not doubled letters. Three examples I can think of off-hand:
Montpellier, France vs Montpelier, Vermont
Hannover, Germany vs Hanover (various states)
Monterrey, Mexico vs Monterey (various states)
In the last example, most of the Monterey’s in the US take their name from a Mexican-American War battle fought at Monterrey. However the Monterey in California does not, since it was around before that war.
ETA: Anyone interested in that list of city names can find it here:
I have both a chequing (CAD) and a checking (USD) account.
I was really put off by the two spellings in the Spelling Bee. And they were the two pangrams too. Ambiance was the only word between me and Queen Bee.
I agree with that, although I did get both spellings of this word. (I missed a couple others, one of which I thought I’d entered, but hadn’t.) But I really wish they’d get rid of all the multiple spellings in their official list. They got rid of most of them, but I have a list of 30-odd words where they haven’t. If anyone’s interested, I can post it. Or maybe we should start an ongoing Spelling Bee thread just for that.
The Academie Francaise has suggested some spelling changes, but I don’t think they have caught on. For example, onion is either oignon (old way) versus ognon (new).
There are various accent marks on vowels in French. In practice they are optional on capital letters.
Indonesian does, for two reasons I can think of: first, they changed the official spelling system in 1972, but remnants of old spellings still persist, especially for proper nouns like Jogjakarta/Yogyakarta. Another reason is the close relationship between Javanese and Indonesian, but while some words are the same the orthography is different (O and A are sort of reversed) and people are often careless about the spelling they use. A lot of gamelan song titles can be spelled two ways - Puspawarna/Puspowarno, for example. Or a phrase like “retno budoyo” v. “retna budaya” (meaning “women’s culture”).
(This is my layperson’s take on things, for sure. A linguist would probably wince and say, “she’s not wrong, but her characterizations are inexact. It would be more correct to say …”)
To name an example from a non-alphabetic script: The People’s Republic of China undertook a major reform of Chinese characters in the 1950s to 1970s to simplify particularly complicated ones, and the reformed spelling has official status there. Most Westerners who study Chinese as a foreign language (not limited to Mandarin) will learn the simplified ones, at least initially; but the reform was not implemented in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, or Japan (where many Chinese characters, called kanji, are in use alongside Japanese scripts). As a result, there are two divergent ways of spelling many Chinese words that co-exist in parallel.
Not in Quebec. About 40 years ago, the Quebec ministry of education bought 50,000 microcomputers from France for somewhere between 50 and 100 million. When it turned out that they didn’t put accents on capitals, they went into a warehouse until the French company came up with a fix. They never did and after maybe 20 years of paying storage costs, they junked them. Of course they were utterly obsolete by then.
I don’t know but I would start by narrowing down to languages that have a single standard written variety and where orthography is a good phonemic representation of the spoken language. Finnish would be a good bet.
Chinese character simplification is a complicated story and we cannot always unequivocally say that the resulting character is not the “same” as the original any more than an italic letter is not the same as the corresponding Roman letter, but, yes, some words in Chinese may be spelled differently (using variant/different characters), in any case.
Confusing to language learners and native Finns alike, both the original spelling and an adapted spelling of the same word may be in use. For example, take a look at these two musical genres:
jazz / jatsi (“jazz”)
country / kantri (“country”)
Although one suspects jazz and jatsi are not pronounced exactly the same in the course of Finnish conversation. Maybe they are by some speakers.
Still in all, though … Finnish seems to have fewer “two correct spellings” words than other European languages.
Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet again - the third time in the last century. The Soviets mandated a change from their Arabic script in 1924, and they chose the Latin alphabet. Then - in 1940 - the Soviets mandated a change to Cyrillic. Skip to 2021, and they are changing back to the Latin alphabet. A lot of red tape to rewrite signs, etc. with the correct corresponding Latin letters.
I’d heard that the Quebecois were a lot more strict about accents than other Francophones. I didn’t know that they would go that far.