Nu Speling

An izi wey tu sho the adiense that This Iz The Feucher iz foar on-skreen riting tu bi speld diferentli, implyeeng that ofishal speling rulz hev chanjd. Usualy the intendid implikashin iz that the langwij haz bin reformd tu deel with difikolt wurdz, but sinse the set dezinerz usualy arint orthografik riform speshalists, nor hav much tym tu pondr sutltys, it ken end up luking lyk the syn riterz just kudnt spel veri wel.

Anothr putenshol prablim iz thuh Eetrnal Eenglish ishu—if yor stori is set thri thouznd yirz in the fewchur, won myt expekt that the langwij had chanjd mor then just in a fiw of the spelings.

This trohp iz waer speling riform iz usd az a wey of shoawyng that the stori iz set in a diferent tym. It dosnt covr Reel Lyf atempts tu riform the langwij, or in-stori atempts tu riform the langwij exept wer theve bekom suxesfol and the nu speling is ubikwitis. It iz allso not tu bi konfusd with Funetik Aksent.

Modern English Version

An easy way to show the audience that This Is The Future is for on-screen writing to be spelled differently, implying that official spelling rules have changed. Usually the intended implication is that the language has been reformed to deal with difficult words, but since the set designers usually aren't orthographic reform specialists, nor have much time to ponder subtleties, it can end up looking like the sign writers just couldn't spell very well.

Another potential problem is the Eternal English issue—if your story is set three thousand years in the future, one might expect that the language had changed more than just in a few of the spellings.

This trope is where spelling reform is used as a way of showing that the story is set in a different time. It doesn't cover Real Life attempts to reform the language, or in-story attempts to reform the language except where they've become successful and the new spelling is ubiquitous. It is also not to be confused with Funetik Aksent.

Examples of Nu Speling include:

The Doctor Who story "The Invisible Enemy", set in the 51st century, features "Egsit" signs among other examples of variant spelling.
Parodied in "Tomorrow Town" by Kim Newman, set in a futurist commune where all writing must conform to a new "rational" spelling system that the founder predicts will be ubiquitous by the end of the century. Really (according to his co-founder), he's just always had dreadful spelling and rather than learn to spell properly he chose to foist his spelling on everybody else.
The early installments of Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire are bereft of the infamous 'ough': 'through' is spelt 'thru', 'though' is 'tho', 'thought' is 'thot', and so on. This might be a Phil Foglio idiosyncrasy rather than a world-building detail, though, because it also happens in other Foglio works of the period, not all of which are set in the future.
In the short story "Enoch Soames," Max Beerbohm recounts how a man sells his soul to the devil in order to see what has become of his work one hundred years after his death. He is allowed to find his name in a literary catalogue written entirely in the phonetic spelling of the future—1997.
In A Sound of Thunder, after one of the characters accidentally kills a butterfly in the far past, it changes the present in several ways, including altering how things are spelled (as in the "Enoch Soames" example, the altered spelling is a lot like Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe).
A short-short attributed to Mark Twain shows spelling reform quickly leading to incomprehensibility.
"Meihem in ce Klasrum", a story by Dolton Edwards published in the classic SF anthology Treasury of Great Science Fiction (ed. Anthony Boucher) is reminiscent of the Twain example, except that by taking longer and letting you get used to each change in turn, it leaves you at the end reading what looks like pure gibberish with little effort.
Almost any word that isn't an obscenity is spelled wrong in Idiocracy to demonstrate how much English has deteriorated.
In the final chapters of Gradisil, not only does the spelling change but the letter eng is re-introduced.
In the Time Travel story of Blake and Mortimer, Mortimer discovers an apocalyptic future where civilization has fallen, the phonetic spellings he encounters are explained to have helped the downfall.
In the Safehold novels, most personal names have gone through this after nine hundred years of lingual shift. Not an unrealistic assumption.
The entirety of the novel Riddley Walker is written in this style, though in this case it's because of a lack of a formal education system in a post nuclear-war England.
Real Life
- The kind of writing used by younger people in texts and emails, as well as online chat, have led to many spelling innovations. Some believe that spellings such as "u" and "thru" will eventually replace longer variants such as "you" and "through".
- Madison Avenue advertising. Deliberately misspelling product names to avoid copyright infringement and to maneuver around legalities has led to names like "Froot Loops" and the "Fireflite".
- The reason that Americans spell a lot of words differently from the rest of the English speaking world. Noah Webster tried (with some success) to simplify English spelling and eliminate some of the inconsistencies. Some of his changes were accepted by Americans, such as dropping the "u" for words like "colour" and "labour," and a few of them even got adopted by the rest of the English speaking world (such as dropping the "k" from the end of words like "publick" and "musick." Others didn't take, even among Americans, such as spelling "women" as "wimmen" or "soup" as "soop."