| Let me guess, you don't speak anything but English? The thing is that English isn't actually that diverse. Certainly not considering how widely it is used and by how many people. There is more variety in how my native Norwegian is spoken, and that is only spoken by 5 million people. You also don't seem to distinguish between dialects, written forms and a language. E.g. Norwegian is a language with dozens of dialects and four written form, two of which are official. The various dialects map to one written form more closely than another. Nothing stops English from being a language of different dialects and different written forms. The point isn't how many written forms there are but that those that exist are standardized. That is IMHO not a very hard thing. E.g. the largest area where English is natively spoken is the US. And the US has almost no variation in how the language is spoken. Yes I know American loudly object to this but I have traveled all over the US and lived several placed. Honestly there is not much difference between how somebody in Grand Forks, North Dakota speaks and somebody in Honolulu, Hawaii. Yes, by American standards it may sound very different. But by say Swiss standards, Norwegian standards etc not very much. Even tiny Britain has more regional variation. One would simply create American, British, Australian etc standardized written forms, while trying to harmonize each written form as well as possible. |
I agree with your point in general that English as is spoken in international media isn't all that diverse, but if you look at the British Isles where the language has traditionally evolved for centuries you'll find a picture that more closely resembles other long-lived non-international (? national?) languages with rich dialectical variation.