[blissofbeing]

I'm more curious with this question

> "A better question, however, might be why aren’t other similar cases around the world treated in the same fashion…? "

It would seem you can't really divorce science from politics, ever.

[knolax]

TBF linguistics as a field doesn't seem to apply empiricism as strictly as the hard sciences. It seems that it was only relatively recently that descriptivism became the norm.