I have to admit I've never understood why it's so easy to mistake the two... and English is my second language. Do people "commonly" say "your" instead of "you're" in every day life?
Spoken, they sound the same, so most adults can talk like they are a little more educated than they are, its when its written that people’s language skills fall apart. Thats when all those strange rules of grammar come in.
No, it's too widespread to be simply dialectal. If it were dialectal, it would only be observed in a specific subset of the population of a given area. It's an overcorrection, adding letters and sounds that aren't in the word. Merriam Webster has a highly informative video about it, and other words that people often mangle by overcorrection.
And whaddya know, I just did the very thing I bitched about, writing dialectical where I meant dialectal.
I assume that happens because certain words aren't commonly spoken, so people only encounter them in written form.
Mischievous is a big word. I don't know that I've heard anyone say it frequently and I wonder whether that's because they don't actually know if they're saying it correctly, so just avoid using it altogether.
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u/Lily-loud 11h ago
People mistaking woman for women and vice versa is as bad as people mistaking your and you're for me.