[coliveira]

That's a straw man. In other languages the rules are also defined by usage. Nobody institutes changes in a language just for the sake of adding new features, like we do in software. The difference is that countries speaking the language agreed on setting common rules, with the goal of making official what is already becoming standard by daily use. Without such an agreement, there will always be some small area that wants to stick to old rules, making communication harder for everyone.

[canjobear]

Au contraire, the French academy loves to change the language for purely subjective/aesthetic reasons in ways that strongly differ from common usage.

[mfcl]

It can happen, but it's pretty rare. And when it happens nothing changes because no one cares.

[ordu]

It works in a funny way sometimes. The last attempted reform in Russian tried to change spelling of several words to better reflect pronunciation. It failed spectacularly because of public outrage: new spelling rules make people to write in a bad spelling. People have been learning for generations that "парашют" must be spelled with 'ю' (not 'у'), the other way they perceived as mistaken, so they perceived new grammar as mistaken, and no logic arguments could change that.

The previous couple of reforms I believe were successful because of communists' ruling style. The first one was dramatic, it removed several letter from alphabet and did a bunch of other changes. People who run away from communists in 1917..24 continued to use old grammar for decades.

> The difference is that countries speaking the language agreed on setting common rules, with the goal of making official what is already becoming standard by daily use.

There is a trouble with that. The standard by daily use is to follow official spelling. Pronunciation could shift sometimes, but spelling is fixed. Any changes in spelling (even official ones) feel as blasphemy. Some people could overcome this feeling, but the most could not and want not.

[BurningFrog]

So what kind of rules do these allegedly successfully language regulating countries enforce?

[ricw]

for one, they would agree on one version of how to write standardize. It's primarily about spelling, and sentence cases, constructs etc. It typically adapts to the language, not the other way around.

[BurningFrog]

Ok. To me, spelling is more of a storage format for language. Not really the language itself.

That makes trying to regulate it more reasonable.