That’s the wonder of English it’s malleable and absorbing cf French for instance which is excluding of other languages. There are many Englishes and all the better for it!

French also absorbs things from other languages, including English, there's just some people who get pissy about it.

Comme l’académie Francais pour example. But si on a plusieurs patois en France 🇫🇷

If you like vandalism, yes.

(I'm not _actually_ opposed to language-change)

I’m not sure what “vandalism” you’re talking about.

Mainly the weird revisionist shit they did to the spelling for no reason. Then there was all that verbing that happened more recently; verbing weirds language.

You need to talk to a competent linguist about this. It’s not “revisionist” that people speaking the same language on a whole other continent naturally developed different spellings and word usage. That’s just how living languages work.

That wasn’t done for no reason. In the early days of the colonies, spelling conventions weren’t entirely set yet. As time went on, spelling words like colour here as “color” became the accepted way. What do you mean by “verbing words”?

What was the problem with colour, plough, connexion etc?

What was the reason to keep vowels Americans weren’t pronouncing (and lots of Brits don’t either)? As to spelling I know how to pronounce Chomondley, Featherstonehaugh, and St. Jean. Conversions change, which isn’t vandalism.

(To be fair I am good at dialects, and pronunciation, but was still confused the first time I saw my friend Sinjin’s name spelled out, esp as his family was SE Asian)

Oh yes; there's a lot of English orthography that has become quite opaque... but "sinjin" being spelt 'St John' makes the etymology pretty apparent. That's got to be worth something.

Going from colour to 'color' isn't phoneticisation. If anything it'd be 'kulir', which ... I could embrace after a fashion. There are etymological clues within spelling that are lost if you just ... revise it. And I think that's a shame. You may disagree.

Your parochialism is a you problem.

Where do they say 'color'? I've spent a long time in the United States, mainly up and down the east coast, but never have I heard anyone say 'color'... unless they were saying 'collar'.

What? What parochialism are you talking about? Why are you trying to start a fight here.

There’s nothing “wrong” with any of those spellings. They’re just British.