> You'd first have to decide which dialect of English would form the basis of the new spelling You would not. You could instead make the rather sensible choice

> You'd first have to decide which dialect of English would form the basis of the new spelling You would not. You could instead make the rather sensible choice of allowing the written forms of distinct, increasingly divergent, dialects to be different from one another. There are several clusters of similar but differing written standards existing side-by-side in Europe, and they don't pose any major challenges to communication. And in some language regions, it's quite common for people to write in their local dialects in informal contexts instead of the standard variety, which also doesn't pose any major challenges to communication. There is very little actual necessity for a single unified standard variety. By the time the dialects would have diverged far enough for there to be issues in communicating due to distinct written forms, perhaps a few centuries from now for English, the alternative of having a unified written form would necessarily mean that to be literate at all, you'd have to learn a foreign language (the unified standard), which would be the worse situation to find oneself in, and it would probably be easier to first acquire literacy in your native language, and then learn the standard as a second language.