Whoever says that English is a phonetic language does not know what a phonetic language is.
The property that characterizes a phonetic language is that you can properly pronounce a written word that you know nothing about.
I wish English was more phonetic. Spelling and pronunciations is a mess. However the language is mostly phonetic.
We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.
And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.
English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.
1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel.
2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects.
3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it.
4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.
That's not really true -- there is and was a great deal of dialect diversity within England itself. It was widespread printing that allowed languages to be standardized at the scale of nation-states in the first place: the divergences that developed after the age of sail were reversing convergence that had only begun a couple of hundred years earlier.
And although versions of English from the south and east of England became the basis for modern standard English, other dialects persisted and sometimes spread around the world, so some of the differences between English dialects globally are due to disparate influences from different dialects originating within the British Isles.
e.g. Northern Italian languages are technically more closely related to Gallo-Romance languages from the other side of the Alps than to standard Italian.
In my experience learning Spanish, their loan words are Spanish-ized, being made to be pronounced and spelled in a format that makes more sense in Spanish. Whereas in English, the pronunciation and spelling is usually taken more directly from the source, so you get a bunch of instances where a word's spelling doesn't really match its pronunciation.
We're still taught very basic phonetic rules in English. Like how vowels have a long sound and a short sound, where "ee" is the long e sound, or "<vowel> <consonant> e" triggers the long sound for that vowel. But you're also taught that many words are exceptions (e.g. bear vs beard). And you learn there are patterns to the exceptions, like how "ea," if it doesn't sound like "ee," will sound like a short e, like in "head" or "breadth," and particularly in cases like "dream - dreamt" or "leap - leapt."
And if you do a lot of reading as a kid, you vaguely recognize in the back of your mind some words that seem to follow a different set of pronunciation rules not taught in school (e.g. rouge, mirage, entourage, entrée, matinée, parfait, buffet, memoir, soirée, patois), which you learn implicitly. I remember this as a kid, only later learning those were French.
And this lets you guess pretty well how you'd pronounce a word. Just with basic rules and a lot of input to learn from, you can guess how to pronounce pretty much anything with good accuracy, because there are rules, and even a logic to the exceptions, but the rules are overlapping, so it's more like a set of rules you choose from.
I'd liken it to machine learning. You can learn the rules without even being taught the rules, like I did in the case of French loan words. And there are probably rules we follow without even realizing it, just instinctively thinking it's the natural way to pronounce the word without knowing why.
I'm not saying it's as good as being as phonetic as Italian, but it's not like we just have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of every word as though it were a structureless string of letters and a corresponding, unrelated sound.
Sorry for the long comment.
I guess I'm really confused. It's not like English is some Arabic language where the orthography is in a second nearly unintelligible languages? Or, Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs... ?
I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before.
Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.
Being able to guess how something is pronounced sometimes is not enough to say that English is phonetically spelled. English often borrows spellings directly from the languages that it is borrowing a word from, those spellings are usually phonetic (based on the source language's rules), and due to the presence of certain peculiar sounds, one can often guess which phonetically-spelled language a word was borrowed from. That's not an English word being spelled phonetically, that's people being forced to become language detectives. You can get lucky and guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character that you've never seen before (based on the radicals), but no one would say that Chinese characters are a phonetic alphabet.
Other than the soundalikes "b" = "v" and in Latin America soft "c" and "z" = "s", when Spanish speakers don't know how to spell a word, it's because they are also saying the word wrong when they speak.
Just as it would be silly to claim that Japanese is not phonetic. Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic. They even have two fully regular alphabets that can both express the same phonemes, but are used for different reasons. As well, they have a completely logographic set that does not relate to phonemes, even though it is used for most writing.
> Of course spoken Japanese is phonetic
"Phonetic" is not a feature of spoken language, but of the relation between other language forms (usually, written, but you could make the same distinction for, say, sign languages) and spoken language.
> They even have two fully regular alphabets
I assume from "two fully regular" you are referring to hiragana and katakana, but those are syllabaries, not alphabets. (Romaji is an alphabetic system, though, but I don't know where you'd find a second one.)
Fair that I should have said they have two phonetic writing systems, decidedly not alphabets. I'm not sure the distinction is one that matters for what we are covering here?
It's a feature linked to spoken languages, since it is a feature of the relation of non-spoken (usually written) language to a spoken language.
But it is not a feature of a spoken language.
> Sign language, for example, is not phonetic, as many users of it cannot speak or hear.
Yes, in causal terms, the fact many users of sign languages aren't familiar with the sounds of the spoken language is a reason sign languages tend not be phonetic, but they are not phonetic in definitional terms because the symbols in the sign language do not represent the sounds of spoken language.
But it would make no sense to call a spoken language phonetic (except maybe if it was a code for a different spoken language, in which the phonemes in one mapped to the individual phonemes, rather than ideas, of the other.)
I get what you are aiming at, but phonetics is about speech. Is why you can reliably say how many phonemes different languages have. If you had to cover all vocalizations that people could do, you would have a bit more trouble.
I'm largely comfortable with the idea that there is something lacking in the orthography of English. Fully comfortable, even. I'm growing frustrated with how many are pushing the idea that it is not phonetic. The system is literally to convey, in writing, the words that you would speak in English. And the word "phonetic" captures that perfectly.
If you want to argue that we are building a new use of the word "phonetic" applied to writing that supersedes "orthography" and related terms. You do you. It still seems nonsensical to me and only works if you ignore that we have an alphabet that is literally used to convey speech sounds.
There is "not being regular" and there is "not even trying, and getting it right by a stroke of luck from time to time".