About a very normative but not very popular field in linguistics: Spelling in school Spelling in french is a complex business and sometimes seen as the most arbitrary part of the linguistic norm. But beyond this characterization, it is a good indicator of the capabilities required by all sorts of learning, and by language-associated skills particularly. good spelling is valued by society and it is the schools' mission to teach it. this article comments on the results of measuring the spelling skills of 10 to 16 year-old pupils in the mandatory french school system at a twenty-year interval. Within a single generation, the level has markedly fallen, and the drop is imputable especially to the grammatical part of orthography (agreements, conjugations) that demands applying regular rules. it is likely that what accounts for the phenomenon are the transformations that have taken place in schooling, but also, more generally, the way society has evolved with relation to norms.