[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.