Recently, one of my English Facebook friends wrote that she and her family had just survived a very cold May Bank Holiday weekend camping with snow on the hills. “We’re you in a caravan?” one of her friends asked. We’re for were? I understand problems with there/they’re/their, its/it’s, your/you’re, since these are homophones, and the absence or presence of the apostrophe is merely a matter of convention. But we’re/were are not homophones, so what is going on?
If you google for “we’re or were”, you get to a Dutch site called “Nu beter Engels”, which explains the difference between where, were and we’re. The site calls these words twijfelwoorden, a lovely word I hadn’t come across before either, which may be translated as “confusables”, a word I first came across in Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English by Caroline Taggart (2010). The book has as many as THIRTY pages of them, but we’re/were is not included.
Googling for we’re/were also took me to Paul Brians’s website accompanying his book Common Errors in English Usage (2003): it was actually the first hit. Brians explains the difference between the two forms. I can see that they might be problematical for non-native speakers of English, but for native speakers of English, too? I would never have guessed it, but apparently so.
Bridging the Unbridgeable 
My entry on my Web site is at http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/were2.html. I suspect in many cases people are not being confused between the two as grammatical entities. Rather, they either don’t know or have forgotten how apostrophes function. Being confused over “it’s/it’s,” they begin to think that an apostrophe is “better” than no apostrophe. They’ve seen “we’re” and something in their brain says “more sophisticated than ‘were.’:”
Thanks for the link, Paul: it’s been added. And yes, I think you may be right. The apostrophe as a mark of sophistication.
Look at the title and body of this post to see somebody confused by apostrophes. They’re used properly various times but he’s inconsistent. Further down in the post: “we we’re set up with a woman at the hospital” and “we’re set.” It’s probably not sloppy typing since it takes extra effort to insert the apostrophe. Fuzzy on the concept, I think.
http://werereallydoingit.com/im-really-so-sorry/
And notice the misused “who’s” further down the page.
Wells, in his “Longman Pronunciation Dictionary” (1990, first edition), agrees with you that “we’re” and “were” aren’t homophones, but they generally are for me!
How interesting! So it might be problematical for all non-RP speakers then.
To be fair, this may simply be an autocorrect or predictive typing issue. Certainly my phone defaults to we’re over were for some reason, perhaps I use it more so the phone has begun to assume I always mean to use it
Does autocorrect work on Facebook?
It does if you use facebook on your phone. My phone had a habit of correcting this (and a multitude of other words) incorrectly too, so I turned off auto-correct. Now I just make my own typos :-D
My English Facebook friends are forever posting pictures explaining the difference between were/we’re/where, their/there/they’re, you’re/your, and its/it’s. Apparently a lot of people get them mixed up, even native speaker!