International Word Competitions

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Victor from Dallas.

Hi, Victor. Welcome to the program.

Hey, Victor.

What’s going on?

Well, I have an interesting question about spelling bees.

It seems that spelling bees only exist in English-speaking countries, and I’m wondering why that is.

Good question. Have you been in a spelling bee before, Victor?

Yes, in third grade. I think that was the last one.

How’d you fare?

I did well in spelling. I don’t recall exactly.

I did.

We’ve talked about this on the show before, but when you lose the school spelling bees, it stays with you for life.

Oh, it’s so painful.

But that’s a good question.

Like, English has spelling bees.

What do they do in the rest of the world?

Not a whole lot in terms of spelling bees per se.

It looks like spelling bees are a distinctly American creation.

It looks like they arose in the 1870s, early 1870s, which sort of makes sense.

You know, you’re out on the prairie and you’re trying to figure out a way to entertain the folks.

And it makes sense that we would have it in English because, of course, English is this complete mess in terms of spelling.

Seriously. The mutt brought all these spellings in from all these other places.

Right. Exactly. I mean, it’s a language based on Latin and Greek and German and all kinds of different words.

So it’s quite different from, say, Spanish, where just about every word sounds like the way it’s spelled.

There are a few exceptions.

Yeah, you might have a B and V confusion, but generally it’s really consistent.

Exactly.

So it’s not going to be that challenging.

So in other countries, they have to find other ways to challenge people in terms of words and spelling.

I know in French they have dictation contests, for example.

Yeah, have you heard of the dictée, Victor?

I have not.

How does that work?

Well, French is interesting is that its problem isn’t so much as English where words are spelled variably.

It’s fairly consistent.

The problem is that a lot of words sound alike.

Their homophones are abundant.

And so they will have a famous author.

They do this in Quebec as well.

Famous author will write a really nice passage and then read it aloud on the radio or in some other forum.

And everyone will do their best to write it exactly, get the accents exactly right, the spelling exactly right, the conjugation of the verbs exactly right.

There are verbs in French where even though it might be conjugated a bunch of different ways, three or four of the conjugations sound the same, even though they’re spelled differently.

And so it’s really incredible.

And you can walk around with pride if you scored very highly on the DIC day.

I think I’ll stick with spelling bees.

Yeah, yeah.

Spelling bees are more just a contest of memorizing, really.

And it’s odd that we don’t see them really in the U.K.

They have them, but they’re not nearly as popular.

Maybe because their spelling is all wrong, right?

With all those U’s where they’re not supposed to be.

But it’s interesting in China, too.

I think they have contests where you race to look up a word in the dictionary.

Because they’re all different ways that the Chinese words are spelled out or written out, rather.

So it’s sort of like the old sword drills in Baptist churches.

Yeah. So, yeah. So for the most part, spelling bees are an English language phenomenon.

And exist only mainly in the United States.

They do exist in Australia and the UK, but they’re not nearly as popular as they are here.

Well, thank you. That’s very helpful. I appreciate the insights.

Cool. Thanks for calling, Victor.

Thanks for calling, Victor.

Take care.

You bet. Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your language questions.

You can call us at 877-929-9673.

Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.