[airstrike]

That's a pretty liberal interpretation of democratic, or a thinly veiled claim that other languages are perhaps "less democratic". If the official body represents the will of the people, then how is it not democratic?

Saying that English is a pretty anarchic language would probably be a more accurate statement, not that there's anything wrong with that fact.

[retrac]

> If the official body represents the will of the people

As anyone who speaks French can tell you, the official body's prescriptions often have no relationship to the will of the people regarding how they actually use the language.

There's quite something to the polysynthetic view where modern French has a verb system with extensive clitics, but such an analysis devoid of appropriate genuflection to Latin gives les grammairiens anciens fits.

[cyphar]

Not to mention that many variants of French (Canadian French, Swiss French, Belgian French, and so on) would -- to my understanding -- not be considered by Académie Française to be "proper French" even though they are objectively French (mutually intelligible) and yet have deviated despite the formation of the Académie Française in the 1600s and its continued existence since the 1800s.

I don't see how the situation would be different with English (especially given that French was not as international in the 1600s as English is today -- so that ship has long since sailed). Not to mention that English spelling reforms have been tried many times in the past and rarely caught on within a single country let alone worldwide[1].

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...

[afiori]

French is well known* to be on the complete opposite spectrum in terms of speed of evolution or disposition to adopt new words/constructs.

Surely there is an happy middle ground.

* as most well known things without strong factual basis

[ivanhoe]

> or a thinly veiled claim that other languages are perhaps "less democratic"

They are exactly that, less democratic, as the language standard is dictated by a committee of academics/politicians, leading to it often diverging significantly from the spoken language. In the most extreme cases language ends up used for the political purposes - for instance in my home country once known as Yugoslavia, following the break out of the federal entities into the new independent countries, there was a big push for separating each dialect of more-or-less common language spoken on the most of the territory into declaratively separate languages in order to backup the whole new politics of separate national countries and to deepen the gap between the new countries. So now we have 4 languages that are in spoken version basically the same, but standard languages differ.

[coliveira]

This is exactly the opposite. English is spoken in different ways across the world, however its written version is dictated by the media of the main countries UK and USA. The way English is managed is as an archaic written language that doesn't take into consideration the way people speak it.

[fpig]

> So now we have 4 languages that are in spoken version basically the same, but standard languages differ.

It's actually the other way around, the standard languages are very similar, but spoken language differs greatly, even between different areas of one country, to the extent of not being mutually intelligible.

[AmericanChopper]

People already use the English language in a manner fitting their will. If you wanted to try and standardize it internationally, you’d either need most speakers to change to the standardized version (not going to happen), or you’d just end up publishing a canonical version for reference which everybody ignores (seems a bit pointless).

More importantly, why would you want to do this? It just seems like a compulsive reaction to the purity of standardization. If inter-dialect communication is the goal, why not establish a standard accent as well?

[ravi-delia]

The problem comes from the body not representing the will of the people. Obviously if some tyrannical standards board made malicious standards no one would actually feel any need to obey, but then of course that's the inherent problem of language standards boards. Either the board simply describes what's already said, or it doesn't, and either way it's useless.

[wolco2]

A system to introduce new words in English exists and it is not anarchic. It's a democratic or popularity contest where if a word is used enough it becomes part of the language and accepted. Dictionaries have standards where a word must appear in print a number of times to be accepted.

Other languages are less dynamic so they are less responsive to introducing new words. Some of those and others controlled by official bodies which may or may not represent the population are less popularity driven. In those cases a guardian relationship exists where words are vetting by others. English is vetted by all.

[coliveira]

That's not true at all, this process doesn't happen just in the English language. Most languages evolve the same way, new words are introduced to the lexicon through the spoken language, newspapers and books, and later added to dictionaries. For example, in German the Duden is printed every five years with new recent words added. The same in happens in other countries where academics create new vocabularies based on current usage.