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The written English language is an odd one. It's technically not at all standardized, or if so by some private non-officially or only locally recognized institu

The written English language is an odd one. It's technically not at all standardized, or if so by some private non-officially or only locally recognized institutions. Unlike other languages, say French and German, that are strictly maintained and rules set by an official institution that may even be cross-border (Germany-Austria). These haven't been shy to institute bigger changes just to make the written language more coherent. Really this just shows how the British empire managed to spread it's word (literally) but not manage to manage it properly. We now have a litany of different English language versions, which is interesting from a cultural perspective but entirely contradicts what a language is made for: communicating. We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language and untangling the current written mess. That way we'd make 10% of English speaker's lives much better...

lalaithion 6y ago
The problem is that English-as-spoken is diverse enough to become unintelligible between some speakers (https://youtu.be/UGRcJQ9tMbY https://youtu.be/UGRcJQ9tMbY), from pronunciation to grammar to vocabulary. Any attempt to standardize English will inevitably result in the fracturing of English into multiple languages.
- YawningAngel 6y ago
  I don't think this is a problem in the real world. It might be hard for second-language speakers, but that's probably true for all languages.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Oh you think that’s rough? Non-english languages are way better at this. In Slovenia, for example, we have about 2 million speakers. Those are divided into 32 dialects. Many of them mutually unintelligible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects Germany has a similar problem with regional dialects. That’s why these languages have a standard official version. Because they need one. The fact English doesn’t have such a standard is fantastic evidence to the relative lack of strong dialects. Then again, we do have BBC English and American Movie English which act as de facto standards. Oh and air traffic control english is also heavily standardized from what I’ve heard. Defined with the rigor of an API.
  - com 6y ago
    Airspeak and her sister Seaspeak. Fabulous reduced grammars and controlled vocabularies.
  - zorked 6y ago
    Basically any language has that many dialects - or many more. English has a ton of unintelligible dialects but you won't hear them on CNN/Hollywood and speakers of those dialects will adjust to a more standardized form of the language to talk to outsiders. Remember that the Caribbean, Africa, etc. all speak English and it's not American/British that they speak. Even traveling in (super-small and birthplace of the language) Great Britain will expose you to a lot of dialects even if locals will swap to a regularized language to talk to you...
    - Swizec 6y ago
      Yep. My point isn’t that Slovenian, German et al are special in having many dialects. Slovenian has way many for such a small language, but all languages have them. What’s interesting about English is the relative lack of dialects outside the UK. It’s already a very standardized lingua franca because of how it spread. And what’s left is solvable with the BBC/Hollywood English. Similar to how germany has hoch deutsch – an invented standard dialect everyone learns in school. You can have a standard form of English taught in schools without demanding say-to-day stabdardization in common use. And we kinda already do. Just unofficially.
- angrygoat 6y ago
  That's a funny sketch, but there is literally a standardised minimal set of English just to deal with this potential problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
- guenthert 6y ago
  That was quite funny, thanks. Welsh however is very much a different language, not a dialect of english. Iechyd da i chwi yn awr ac yn oesoedd!
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  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.
  - jhanschoo 6y ago
    > 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. 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.
dmitriid 6y ago
> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language "Standardising a language" never works. Prescriptivism rarely does because languages are living things and evolve no matter how many rules you throw at them. > untangling the current written mess Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.
- ginko 6y ago
  >"Standardising a language" never works. Apart from the many instances where it worked I guess. English is really the odd one out here for not having a standard body.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    > Apart from the many instances where it worked I guess. It never really worked in those instances. What you see in the books and what you hear in real life are often two quite different things. Even things like grammar rarely survive real life.
    - ginko 6y ago
      But that's spoken language. We're talking about written language standardization here. edit: And arguably even spoken language eventually gets standardized through the written word. There's tons of regional German dialects without High-German, a more or less randomly chosen dialect, people from different regions would have a hard time even talking to each other.
      - dmitriid 6y ago
        Let me quote directly from my original answer: > Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.
    - 6y ago
jandrese 6y ago
It's probably too late to start now. Those dialects are now considered part of the culture and if you tried to standardize them out you'll be accused of cultural whitewashing.
- qppo 6y ago
  .. maybe because you would be whitewashing the language,
dqv 6y ago
Do you know how they resolve weird grammatical constructions that are now a part of regional dialects? One that comes to mind is "How it works?" Although it sounds weird, it is now common enough that there is no way to retroactively correct all the times it has come up. The other one I see a lot is starting a sentence without an article e.g. "Asking, 'How it works?' is now considered grammatically correct. Reason being [,|that] it is frequently used in spoken English."
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  From my experience in Germany: You can still write however you want. The rules mainly matter if you are in school or in publishing or similar. Thus language can still evolve and the standardization body will eventually catch up. In some ways auto correct is a stronger enforcer.
  - cgriswald 6y ago
    > In some way auto correct is a stronger enforcer. I’m looking forward to the day when duck is considered a swear word.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  "How it looks like" is a similar incorrect and often used phrase that bugs me. Someone just mashed up "How it looks" and "What it looks like" and it stuck.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > One that comes to mind is "How it works?". I've never heard that phrase before, so I guess it does qualify as wierd, but it's clearly following the same grammatical construction as [looks at hamburger] "Hamburger?", ie asking "X?" as a offer or request for X.
  - dqv 6y ago
    It's usually a heading in a description of how something works. It is more natural to say either "How it works" (with no question mark) or "How does it work?"
malcsm 6y ago
> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language How can we standardise English when we can't even agree on the spelling of the word 'standardise'. But, seriously, one of the strengths of English is that it is a democratic language. It is usage which defines the language, not some official body.
- airstrike 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
    - afiori 6y ago
      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
    - cyphar 6y ago
      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_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...
Spinnaker_ 6y ago
How does English compare to other languages in terms of adaptability and expression of new ideas and concepts? My intuition is that it would score much higher in these regards. I don't know if this is correct. One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word.
- airstrike 6y ago
  > One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word. I'd wager this is due to the outsized influence of American and British culture in other nations, the sheer number of people who speak English as a second or third language, and the relative ease with which certain English words can be borrowed into languages with entirely different phonemes relative to the other way around.
- coliveira 6y ago
  Quite the opposite, English is a relatively poor language that lacks many refined elements found in many other languages such as specific gender and verbal inflection. A language like German is able to create very specific words by a well defined process, a process that is missing in English. So, while it is possible to express a lot of different meanings in English, the language is not very sophisticated at this compared to others. The big advantage enjoyed by English is the fact that it has been spread by the two imperial world powers of the last 200 years.
  - jimktrains2 6y ago
    Why do you consider gender inflections to be refined? Genderized things are essentially arbitrary and just something else that needs to be memorized. Even for people it gets tedious at times, hence why english has has the singular they for quite a while for referring to positions or unspecified people.
    - wolfgke 6y ago
      > Genderized things are [...] just something else that needs to be memorized The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.
stakkur 6y ago
Language is always evolving in some fashion--no language is truly 'static'. This varies by language and culture. One way to observe this is to see the development of dictionaries over time.
- afiori 6y ago
  This is dependent on what you consider to be the purpose of a dictionary, to me there are two slightly different options: 1) A dictionary is a representation of agreed upon words and their meaning (as in scrabble). 2) A dictionary is a list of how you are likely to encounter a word being used. (as in urban dictionary) with the latter a dictionary is a tool to help you better understand word/uses that can be unclear, with the former a dictionary provides justification for your choices of wording (the dictionary defines this word so and so, therefore my usage was correct). In my opinion dictionaries are trying to be 2) but people use them as 1). It is how we get definition of "Literally: not literally, figuratively"; "literally" does not mean "not literally" it is simply used very often like that for emphasis.
OriginalPenguin 6y ago
Other languages that are spoken in multiple countries might be technically standardized, like the RAE does with Spanish. But that doesn't mean people outside of Spain follow the standard. (And depending on class and what part of Spain you live in, there's a good chance you don't follow the standard either, I'd imagine.)
- afiori 6y ago
  people not following the standard does not remove value from a standard. For centuries people wrote in Latin in Europe not because it was anyone natural language, but because of the reach it would grant[1]. [1] and because in many cases local languages were less sophisticated and inadequate to philosophy/poetry.
  - zorked 6y ago
    Your point [1] on the capabilities of some languages is generally discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
    - afiori 6y ago
      If I understand the topic then linguistic relativity has nothing to do with this, consider the fictional language of cave-speak as a stripped down version of English, It is reasonable to imagine that it would be harder to discuss theology or write the principia mathematica in such a language.
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moron4hire 6y ago
While it is true that English is mutable across time and non-standardized across cultures, for an individual learning English as their first language, they are learning a snapshot of it that is--from their perspective--immutable and standardized. The article's argument is the lack of consistency, not standardization. Unless you are arguing that children--in whom dyslexia first manifests--are being exposed to the vast diversity of English across time and space, then there can be no doubt that mutability and lack of unified culture contributes nothing to dyslexia.
drieddust 6y ago
Funny story when I was in the UK two people born and brought up in the country came to my desk talking about a third person. I honestly thought they were speaking about two different people. While I was totally confused they seems to perfectly at peace pronouncing same name so differently. It was a classic Shawn vs Sean moment[1]. This feels weird personally because in my mother language Hindi this is nearly impossible. Each alphabet have a distinct sound. You just pronounce a word in 2 different manners. [1] https://youtu.be/69UlVQpYwUE?t=85 https://youtu.be/69UlVQpYwUE?t=85
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Sean is not originally English but Irish. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean And it has different pronunciations depending on the region.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I think that's what makes it so special. If a particular culture has a way of saying something, they aren't confined to rigid rules. They can take the base concepts and modify them in a way that suits them while also maintaining a common vernacular with the "motherland."
- monkpit 6y ago
  > they aren’t confined to rigid rules Ok, but let’s just assume for a second that there was some standard. Your statement would still be true. Nobody is “confined to rigid rules” unless we also make the Grammar Police a real thing.
BrandiATMuhkuh 6y ago
If you asked a linguistics (not a writer) s/he will tell you the following: Language is simply a reflection of the people who speak it. In other words, the more diverse the population of this language is, the more diverse the language will be. This is also why the German language was so cohesive, but is getting more and more diverse. Because, the German speaking population is now more diverse.
- bgorman 6y ago
  I don't think German is the poster child for cohesion. Swiss German, Bavarian German, Swabian German, Low German and High German sound completely different and use different vocabulary. The differences are much greater than the differences between Spanish or English dialects for example.
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  That linguistic is then an idiot, and you should not listen to that person, because they clearly have no clue what they are talking about. If this claim was true, the conclusion would be that all of the US is a less diverse place than my native Norway. Why? Because the Norwegian language is far more diverse in how people speak it than American English. And your assessment of German, displays a lack of historical knowledge of how language develops and get standardized. Most European languages tended to be far more diverse in the past. Contrary to your claim all European languages have become ever more homogenous in modern times. Why you ask? Because language tends to develop into different forms in isolation. Hence all of Europe has historically been a patchwork of languages. The formation of nation states through the 1800s and standardized schooling is what caused the gradual homogenization of language. It is the late founding of the US, which the the reason why American English is so homogenous despite the size of the country and its diversity. French, German, Norwegian, Dutch and plenty of other European languages was in fact so diverse that a national standardization was needed in large part to actually be able to write books which could be used throughout. In fact in my native Norway creating a written form of Norwegian proved so difficult we ended up with something like four different written forms all with different spelling and grammatical rules. Two of these written forms are official and taught all over Norway. Neither written form really corresponds exactly to how anybody speaks as Norwegians speak a multitude of dialects with different pronouns, grammar and words which loosely map to either of the written forms. But at least by having a language board we have somebody trying to make sure the spelling isn't the utter mess that English is. English grammar is easier than Norwegian grammar, but the spelling is the worst of any language I have learned.
jackfoxy 6y ago
Nope. You have not convinced me a top down authority for the English language is necessary of even desirable. I call this approach the engineer's fallacy of seeing something messy and wanting to engineer it right away. I do occasionally cringe at changes to English driven by the great influx of non-native speakers and lack of education of even the native speakers, my favorite being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question But hey, it's all good. This is how culture changes language. It's a living dynamic.
- cartoonfoxes 6y ago
  Notably, subsets of English are already standardized in domains where this would be useful. For example, Aviation English and Simplified Technical English, maintained by the ICAO and ASD respectively. This approach whereby a language is only "standardized" for use in a specific domain makes sense to me.
- qsort 6y ago
  This is also the default positions of most (almost all) linguists. You don't get to tell a dog what counts as barking.
  - LudwigNagasena 6y ago
    People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication. By the way, it shouldn’t matter at all what a linguist thinks about that unless it is literally his field of expertise. And political sociolinguistics is not a field of expertise of most linguists.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      This. Just because it's not expert group X's job to study Y, doesn't mean Y is unimportant or can be ignored.
    - qsort 6y ago
      > People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication. Yeah but do they? It doesn't seem to me like a standard of this kind is anywhere near a priority for anybody. I'm not even a native speaker and I never felt the need of it. Why are we trying to fix something that's clearly not broken?
hilbert42 6y ago
'We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language and untangling the current written mess.' Nice idea methinks but I reckon there's not a snowball's chance. For starters, Anglophone countries would have to agree upon some structure or institution to act as a regulator à la the Académie Française, (the Moderator of the French Language): https://www.thoughtco.com/academie-francaise-1364522 https://www.thoughtco.com/academie-francaise-1364522. Given past and present politics, it seems to me they'd first delare war on each other before ever agreeing to that!
- socialdemocrat 6y ago
  Seriously this isn't a problem. My native Norwegian exists in 4 different written forms. Two of the forms are official. A language can have multiple written forms. Both of these forms are maintained by the Norwegian language board. You simple create a British, American, Canadian, Australian etc language board. Then these boards can choose to coordinate and cooperate. There is no problem having multiple written forms. The point is two have these written forms standardized and maintained. E.g. Norwegian regularly imports new words from other languages. Usually the board will create Norwegian variants of these following Norwegian phonetical rules. These become one of several valid variant of a word. E.g. we imported the word "genre" from French. The board made a Norwegian spelling for it "sjanger." Both versions where valid until gradually "sjanger" replaced "genre." The Dutch and the Flemish have different language boards but the cooperate so Dutch and Flemish is to my knowledge almost identical in spelling.
  - hilbert42 6y ago
    I truly hope my cynicism is unwarranted, that I'm wrong, and that your ideas are viable and would work because English is in an almighty mess (and I feel sorry for those who have to learn it as a second language). However, I think you overestimate the ability for any agreement within any Anglophone country let alone even a partial agreement across any or all of them. You come from a part of the world that is renowned for its sense and civility, whereas over the last 40 or so years the Anglophone countries have had internal squabbles over just about everything and anything to the extent that they have—in parts—become almost dysfunctional, democracy just isn't working to the extent that it once did. I say this as someone who was born in one, worked in three of them, and travelled to the others at various times over the years. Take the US for instance: the country has become so polarised over whether to wear facemasks in the COVID-19 epidemic—even after getting the best advice available to wear them—that one could be forgiven for thinking that insanity pills have been added to its water supplies. It's likely the very notion that someone or authority might make suggestions about changing the way people write or speak—even if it's not aimed directly at specific individuals—would likely be taken as an affront by many. Again, I'd love to be proved wrong as I've been saying for years that both pronunciation and spelling would be much easier if English were to introduce characters with accents/diacriticals into those awkward, pesky words such as 'through', 'thorough', 'thought' and so on. In fact, I posted a rather long response on the neurosciencenews.com website asking if anyone knew of any research work that's been carried out with bad spellers and those with demonstrated dyslexia with the aim of helping them to overcome their reading difficulties 'by training them with accented text (albeit suitably contrived for the purpose)'. I went on to suggest 'that if it's not so then this might be an avenue worthy of research'. It seems to me, that if any progress is to be made in cleaning up English then the lever could well come from a successful—or even partially successful—way of treating dyslexia (as the research would have demonstrated that the changes to the language were worthwhile and should be made). Your point about multiple implementations is worthy of note. If say changes were made to books specifically printed for dyslexic people then, over time, some or all of the changes could be more widely adopted. My post hasn't appeared on neurosciencenews.com yet, presumably as it's a moderated site. I'll look at the post again and see if parts of it are suitable for posting here, if so then I'll post them directly below in reply to this post.
wheels 6y ago
I'd argue that you tend to see that happen in countries where the largest / most powerful speaker of that language is also the source of the language, such as French and German, and not in countries where the largest (in population) / most powerful (in size of economy) is not the originator, such as English (USA), Spanish (Mexico) or Portuguese (Brazil).
- 101008 6y ago
  La Real Academia Española rules the Spanish for Spain and Latin America.
  - ajot 6y ago
    More or less, there are many country-based language academies for Spanish, the first not-from-Spain being the colombian one. RAE now is part of a panhispanic community of Spanish language academies. That's why, for example, there is a "Diccionario panhispánico de dudas". You can read a little more about this at: https://www.rae.es/la-institucion/politica-panhispanica https://www.rae.es/la-institucion/politica-panhispanica
    - 101008 6y ago
      Yes, but that dictionary is from the RAE itself, so it is ruled by them.
- deleted 6y ago
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vonwoodson 6y ago
Boo that man!! Booo!!! Boo!!!
kenniskrag 6y ago
> Unlike other languages, say French and German, that are strictly maintained and rules set by an official institution that may even be cross-border (Germany-Austria). For german there aren't any standards maintained by an institution. Duden [1] is an institution, which tries but they aren't official imho. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden
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MagnumPIG 6y ago
This is not entirely correct for French. Though there is an Académie Française in France, it doesn't directly dictate rules to other French-speaking nations and cultures. This is because France doesn't contain the majority of French speakers in the world, and even if it did there doesn't seem to be an incentive to follow any rules they may publish. Source: I live in Québec, we don't defer to the Académie.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  Right, I know, whenever I've been in Québec I've found my poor French to be even worse! Escaping to Ontario is my usual relief. ;-)
ravi-delia 6y ago
What do you imagine a standards board for English doing? Publishing an official standard and then everyone rejoices that finally someone has told them how to write the language they already write in? How is it any different from the myriad of 'rules' made up by well-intentioned people through history, many of which are now responsible for English's lack of well defined spelling rules? In the end such a body would wind up either as descriptive, which is interesting academically but also useless from a standardization perspective, or prescriptive, which would just lead to it being happily ignored.
mmmBacon 6y ago
I love that English is messy. The messiness is what gives richness and new words and allows for richness and diversity of expression. There are some people who are truly masterful with their choices of words and word ordering. If English had a central authority, I’d imagine that we’d have missed out on numerous great works.
biztos 6y ago
I'm surprised I didn't see more native German speakers refute this. First, German is not standardized, and the attempts to (re-)standardize it are, let's say, controversial.[0] Even within Germany there are vast differences within the spoken language, mostly but not exclusively by region. The written language is more uniform but that's also a bit contested. I'm not a linguist but I'd guess the differences are at least as strong as in different parts of the UK. For example in Berlin you would have the advantage that a native speaker of any form of German can pretty much understand the natives when they talk amongst themselves. You would not have that luxury in Swabia. Second, the idea that this presumed standard crosses borders is... well sorry but it's absurd. Ask any Austrian or Swiss-German. Or even read their newspapers. And finally, English is rapidly creeping into unofficial-but-official German. For example they routinely say "Vaccine" in the news instead of "Impfstoff" now. I could go on but I guess it's off topic. German is a living language, and an international one, and as much as Duden might have been a guiding light to my generation it's not that for the kids at all. [0]: (in German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...
danans 6y ago
> That way we'd make 10% of English speaker's lives much better... Which 10% is that?

lalaithion 6y ago

The problem is that English-as-spoken is diverse enough to become unintelligible between some speakers (https://youtu.be/UGRcJQ9tMbY https://youtu.be/UGRcJQ9tMbY), from pronunciation to grammar to vocabulary. Any attempt to standardize English will inevitably result in the fracturing of English into multiple languages.

YawningAngel 6y ago
I don't think this is a problem in the real world. It might be hard for second-language speakers, but that's probably true for all languages.
Swizec 6y ago
Oh you think that’s rough? Non-english languages are way better at this. In Slovenia, for example, we have about 2 million speakers. Those are divided into 32 dialects. Many of them mutually unintelligible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_dialects Germany has a similar problem with regional dialects. That’s why these languages have a standard official version. Because they need one. The fact English doesn’t have such a standard is fantastic evidence to the relative lack of strong dialects. Then again, we do have BBC English and American Movie English which act as de facto standards. Oh and air traffic control english is also heavily standardized from what I’ve heard. Defined with the rigor of an API.
- com 6y ago
  Airspeak and her sister Seaspeak. Fabulous reduced grammars and controlled vocabularies.
- zorked 6y ago
  Basically any language has that many dialects - or many more. English has a ton of unintelligible dialects but you won't hear them on CNN/Hollywood and speakers of those dialects will adjust to a more standardized form of the language to talk to outsiders. Remember that the Caribbean, Africa, etc. all speak English and it's not American/British that they speak. Even traveling in (super-small and birthplace of the language) Great Britain will expose you to a lot of dialects even if locals will swap to a regularized language to talk to you...
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Yep. My point isn’t that Slovenian, German et al are special in having many dialects. Slovenian has way many for such a small language, but all languages have them. What’s interesting about English is the relative lack of dialects outside the UK. It’s already a very standardized lingua franca because of how it spread. And what’s left is solvable with the BBC/Hollywood English. Similar to how germany has hoch deutsch – an invented standard dialect everyone learns in school. You can have a standard form of English taught in schools without demanding say-to-day stabdardization in common use. And we kinda already do. Just unofficially.
angrygoat 6y ago
That's a funny sketch, but there is literally a standardised minimal set of English just to deal with this potential problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
guenthert 6y ago
That was quite funny, thanks. Welsh however is very much a different language, not a dialect of english. Iechyd da i chwi yn awr ac yn oesoedd!
socialdemocrat 6y ago
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.
- jhanschoo 6y ago
  > 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. 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.

dmitriid 6y ago

> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language "Standardising a language" never works. Prescriptivism rarely does because languages are living things and evolve no matter how many rules you throw at them. > untangling the current written mess Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.

ginko 6y ago
>"Standardising a language" never works. Apart from the many instances where it worked I guess. English is really the odd one out here for not having a standard body.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > Apart from the many instances where it worked I guess. It never really worked in those instances. What you see in the books and what you hear in real life are often two quite different things. Even things like grammar rarely survive real life.
  - ginko 6y ago
    But that's spoken language. We're talking about written language standardization here. edit: And arguably even spoken language eventually gets standardized through the written word. There's tons of regional German dialects without High-German, a more or less randomly chosen dialect, people from different regions would have a hard time even talking to each other.
    - dmitriid 6y ago
      Let me quote directly from my original answer: > Reforming the written language, however, is quite a possibility, and is often a good thing, because it actually follows a language's evolution rather than pretending that rigid rules reflect reality.
  - 6y ago

jandrese 6y ago

It's probably too late to start now. Those dialects are now considered part of the culture and if you tried to standardize them out you'll be accused of cultural whitewashing.

qppo 6y ago
.. maybe because you would be whitewashing the language,

dqv 6y ago

Do you know how they resolve weird grammatical constructions that are now a part of regional dialects? One that comes to mind is "How it works?" Although it sounds weird, it is now common enough that there is no way to retroactively correct all the times it has come up. The other one I see a lot is starting a sentence without an article e.g. "Asking, 'How it works?' is now considered grammatically correct. Reason being [,|that] it is frequently used in spoken English."

ajmurmann 6y ago
From my experience in Germany: You can still write however you want. The rules mainly matter if you are in school or in publishing or similar. Thus language can still evolve and the standardization body will eventually catch up. In some ways auto correct is a stronger enforcer.
- cgriswald 6y ago
  > In some way auto correct is a stronger enforcer. I’m looking forward to the day when duck is considered a swear word.
dahfizz 6y ago
"How it looks like" is a similar incorrect and often used phrase that bugs me. Someone just mashed up "How it looks" and "What it looks like" and it stuck.
a1369209993 6y ago
> One that comes to mind is "How it works?". I've never heard that phrase before, so I guess it does qualify as wierd, but it's clearly following the same grammatical construction as [looks at hamburger] "Hamburger?", ie asking "X?" as a offer or request for X.
- dqv 6y ago
  It's usually a heading in a description of how something works. It is more natural to say either "How it works" (with no question mark) or "How does it work?"

malcsm 6y ago

> We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language How can we standardise English when we can't even agree on the spelling of the word 'standardise'. But, seriously, one of the strengths of English is that it is a democratic language. It is usage which defines the language, not some official body.

airstrike 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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.
  - afiori 6y ago
    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
  - cyphar 6y ago
    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_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...

Spinnaker_ 6y ago

How does English compare to other languages in terms of adaptability and expression of new ideas and concepts? My intuition is that it would score much higher in these regards. I don't know if this is correct. One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word.

airstrike 6y ago
> One example would be that many newer words in English don't ever get translations in other languages, they just use the English word. I'd wager this is due to the outsized influence of American and British culture in other nations, the sheer number of people who speak English as a second or third language, and the relative ease with which certain English words can be borrowed into languages with entirely different phonemes relative to the other way around.
coliveira 6y ago
Quite the opposite, English is a relatively poor language that lacks many refined elements found in many other languages such as specific gender and verbal inflection. A language like German is able to create very specific words by a well defined process, a process that is missing in English. So, while it is possible to express a lot of different meanings in English, the language is not very sophisticated at this compared to others. The big advantage enjoyed by English is the fact that it has been spread by the two imperial world powers of the last 200 years.
- jimktrains2 6y ago
  Why do you consider gender inflections to be refined? Genderized things are essentially arbitrary and just something else that needs to be memorized. Even for people it gets tedious at times, hence why english has has the singular they for quite a while for referring to positions or unspecified people.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > Genderized things are [...] just something else that needs to be memorized The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.

stakkur 6y ago

Language is always evolving in some fashion--no language is truly 'static'. This varies by language and culture. One way to observe this is to see the development of dictionaries over time.

afiori 6y ago
This is dependent on what you consider to be the purpose of a dictionary, to me there are two slightly different options: 1) A dictionary is a representation of agreed upon words and their meaning (as in scrabble). 2) A dictionary is a list of how you are likely to encounter a word being used. (as in urban dictionary) with the latter a dictionary is a tool to help you better understand word/uses that can be unclear, with the former a dictionary provides justification for your choices of wording (the dictionary defines this word so and so, therefore my usage was correct). In my opinion dictionaries are trying to be 2) but people use them as 1). It is how we get definition of "Literally: not literally, figuratively"; "literally" does not mean "not literally" it is simply used very often like that for emphasis.

OriginalPenguin 6y ago

Other languages that are spoken in multiple countries might be technically standardized, like the RAE does with Spanish. But that doesn't mean people outside of Spain follow the standard. (And depending on class and what part of Spain you live in, there's a good chance you don't follow the standard either, I'd imagine.)

afiori 6y ago
people not following the standard does not remove value from a standard. For centuries people wrote in Latin in Europe not because it was anyone natural language, but because of the reach it would grant[1]. [1] and because in many cases local languages were less sophisticated and inadequate to philosophy/poetry.
- zorked 6y ago
  Your point [1] on the capabilities of some languages is generally discredited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
  - afiori 6y ago
    If I understand the topic then linguistic relativity has nothing to do with this, consider the fictional language of cave-speak as a stripped down version of English, It is reasonable to imagine that it would be harder to discuss theology or write the principia mathematica in such a language.

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moron4hire 6y ago

While it is true that English is mutable across time and non-standardized across cultures, for an individual learning English as their first language, they are learning a snapshot of it that is--from their perspective--immutable and standardized. The article's argument is the lack of consistency, not standardization. Unless you are arguing that children--in whom dyslexia first manifests--are being exposed to the vast diversity of English across time and space, then there can be no doubt that mutability and lack of unified culture contributes nothing to dyslexia.

drieddust 6y ago

Funny story when I was in the UK two people born and brought up in the country came to my desk talking about a third person. I honestly thought they were speaking about two different people. While I was totally confused they seems to perfectly at peace pronouncing same name so differently. It was a classic Shawn vs Sean moment[1]. This feels weird personally because in my mother language Hindi this is nearly impossible. Each alphabet have a distinct sound. You just pronounce a word in 2 different manners. [1] https://youtu.be/69UlVQpYwUE?t=85 https://youtu.be/69UlVQpYwUE?t=85

kwhitefoot 6y ago
Sean is not originally English but Irish. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean And it has different pronunciations depending on the region.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

I think that's what makes it so special. If a particular culture has a way of saying something, they aren't confined to rigid rules. They can take the base concepts and modify them in a way that suits them while also maintaining a common vernacular with the "motherland."

monkpit 6y ago
> they aren’t confined to rigid rules Ok, but let’s just assume for a second that there was some standard. Your statement would still be true. Nobody is “confined to rigid rules” unless we also make the Grammar Police a real thing.

BrandiATMuhkuh 6y ago

If you asked a linguistics (not a writer) s/he will tell you the following: Language is simply a reflection of the people who speak it. In other words, the more diverse the population of this language is, the more diverse the language will be. This is also why the German language was so cohesive, but is getting more and more diverse. Because, the German speaking population is now more diverse.

bgorman 6y ago
I don't think German is the poster child for cohesion. Swiss German, Bavarian German, Swabian German, Low German and High German sound completely different and use different vocabulary. The differences are much greater than the differences between Spanish or English dialects for example.
socialdemocrat 6y ago
That linguistic is then an idiot, and you should not listen to that person, because they clearly have no clue what they are talking about. If this claim was true, the conclusion would be that all of the US is a less diverse place than my native Norway. Why? Because the Norwegian language is far more diverse in how people speak it than American English. And your assessment of German, displays a lack of historical knowledge of how language develops and get standardized. Most European languages tended to be far more diverse in the past. Contrary to your claim all European languages have become ever more homogenous in modern times. Why you ask? Because language tends to develop into different forms in isolation. Hence all of Europe has historically been a patchwork of languages. The formation of nation states through the 1800s and standardized schooling is what caused the gradual homogenization of language. It is the late founding of the US, which the the reason why American English is so homogenous despite the size of the country and its diversity. French, German, Norwegian, Dutch and plenty of other European languages was in fact so diverse that a national standardization was needed in large part to actually be able to write books which could be used throughout. In fact in my native Norway creating a written form of Norwegian proved so difficult we ended up with something like four different written forms all with different spelling and grammatical rules. Two of these written forms are official and taught all over Norway. Neither written form really corresponds exactly to how anybody speaks as Norwegians speak a multitude of dialects with different pronouns, grammar and words which loosely map to either of the written forms. But at least by having a language board we have somebody trying to make sure the spelling isn't the utter mess that English is. English grammar is easier than Norwegian grammar, but the spelling is the worst of any language I have learned.

jackfoxy 6y ago

Nope. You have not convinced me a top down authority for the English language is necessary of even desirable. I call this approach the engineer's fallacy of seeing something messy and wanting to engineer it right away. I do occasionally cringe at changes to English driven by the great influx of non-native speakers and lack of education of even the native speakers, my favorite being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question But hey, it's all good. This is how culture changes language. It's a living dynamic.

cartoonfoxes 6y ago
Notably, subsets of English are already standardized in domains where this would be useful. For example, Aviation English and Simplified Technical English, maintained by the ICAO and ASD respectively. This approach whereby a language is only "standardized" for use in a specific domain makes sense to me.
qsort 6y ago
This is also the default positions of most (almost all) linguists. You don't get to tell a dog what counts as barking.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication. By the way, it shouldn’t matter at all what a linguist thinks about that unless it is literally his field of expertise. And political sociolinguistics is not a field of expertise of most linguists.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    This. Just because it's not expert group X's job to study Y, doesn't mean Y is unimportant or can be ignored.
  - qsort 6y ago
    > People aren’t dogs and they may desire a unified standard that simplifies communication. Yeah but do they? It doesn't seem to me like a standard of this kind is anywhere near a priority for anybody. I'm not even a native speaker and I never felt the need of it. Why are we trying to fix something that's clearly not broken?

hilbert42 6y ago

'We really ought to start officially standardizing the English language and untangling the current written mess.' Nice idea methinks but I reckon there's not a snowball's chance. For starters, Anglophone countries would have to agree upon some structure or institution to act as a regulator à la the Académie Française, (the Moderator of the French Language): https://www.thoughtco.com/academie-francaise-1364522 https://www.thoughtco.com/academie-francaise-1364522. Given past and present politics, it seems to me they'd first delare war on each other before ever agreeing to that!

socialdemocrat 6y ago
Seriously this isn't a problem. My native Norwegian exists in 4 different written forms. Two of the forms are official. A language can have multiple written forms. Both of these forms are maintained by the Norwegian language board. You simple create a British, American, Canadian, Australian etc language board. Then these boards can choose to coordinate and cooperate. There is no problem having multiple written forms. The point is two have these written forms standardized and maintained. E.g. Norwegian regularly imports new words from other languages. Usually the board will create Norwegian variants of these following Norwegian phonetical rules. These become one of several valid variant of a word. E.g. we imported the word "genre" from French. The board made a Norwegian spelling for it "sjanger." Both versions where valid until gradually "sjanger" replaced "genre." The Dutch and the Flemish have different language boards but the cooperate so Dutch and Flemish is to my knowledge almost identical in spelling.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  I truly hope my cynicism is unwarranted, that I'm wrong, and that your ideas are viable and would work because English is in an almighty mess (and I feel sorry for those who have to learn it as a second language). However, I think you overestimate the ability for any agreement within any Anglophone country let alone even a partial agreement across any or all of them. You come from a part of the world that is renowned for its sense and civility, whereas over the last 40 or so years the Anglophone countries have had internal squabbles over just about everything and anything to the extent that they have—in parts—become almost dysfunctional, democracy just isn't working to the extent that it once did. I say this as someone who was born in one, worked in three of them, and travelled to the others at various times over the years. Take the US for instance: the country has become so polarised over whether to wear facemasks in the COVID-19 epidemic—even after getting the best advice available to wear them—that one could be forgiven for thinking that insanity pills have been added to its water supplies. It's likely the very notion that someone or authority might make suggestions about changing the way people write or speak—even if it's not aimed directly at specific individuals—would likely be taken as an affront by many. Again, I'd love to be proved wrong as I've been saying for years that both pronunciation and spelling would be much easier if English were to introduce characters with accents/diacriticals into those awkward, pesky words such as 'through', 'thorough', 'thought' and so on. In fact, I posted a rather long response on the neurosciencenews.com website asking if anyone knew of any research work that's been carried out with bad spellers and those with demonstrated dyslexia with the aim of helping them to overcome their reading difficulties 'by training them with accented text (albeit suitably contrived for the purpose)'. I went on to suggest 'that if it's not so then this might be an avenue worthy of research'. It seems to me, that if any progress is to be made in cleaning up English then the lever could well come from a successful—or even partially successful—way of treating dyslexia (as the research would have demonstrated that the changes to the language were worthwhile and should be made). Your point about multiple implementations is worthy of note. If say changes were made to books specifically printed for dyslexic people then, over time, some or all of the changes could be more widely adopted. My post hasn't appeared on neurosciencenews.com yet, presumably as it's a moderated site. I'll look at the post again and see if parts of it are suitable for posting here, if so then I'll post them directly below in reply to this post.

wheels 6y ago

I'd argue that you tend to see that happen in countries where the largest / most powerful speaker of that language is also the source of the language, such as French and German, and not in countries where the largest (in population) / most powerful (in size of economy) is not the originator, such as English (USA), Spanish (Mexico) or Portuguese (Brazil).

101008 6y ago
La Real Academia Española rules the Spanish for Spain and Latin America.
- ajot 6y ago
  More or less, there are many country-based language academies for Spanish, the first not-from-Spain being the colombian one. RAE now is part of a panhispanic community of Spanish language academies. That's why, for example, there is a "Diccionario panhispánico de dudas". You can read a little more about this at: https://www.rae.es/la-institucion/politica-panhispanica https://www.rae.es/la-institucion/politica-panhispanica
  - 101008 6y ago
    Yes, but that dictionary is from the RAE itself, so it is ruled by them.
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vonwoodson 6y ago

Boo that man!! Booo!!! Boo!!!

kenniskrag 6y ago

> Unlike other languages, say French and German, that are strictly maintained and rules set by an official institution that may even be cross-border (Germany-Austria). For german there aren't any standards maintained by an institution. Duden [1] is an institution, which tries but they aren't official imho. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duden

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MagnumPIG 6y ago

This is not entirely correct for French. Though there is an Académie Française in France, it doesn't directly dictate rules to other French-speaking nations and cultures. This is because France doesn't contain the majority of French speakers in the world, and even if it did there doesn't seem to be an incentive to follow any rules they may publish. Source: I live in Québec, we don't defer to the Académie.

hilbert42 6y ago
Right, I know, whenever I've been in Québec I've found my poor French to be even worse! Escaping to Ontario is my usual relief. ;-)

ravi-delia 6y ago

What do you imagine a standards board for English doing? Publishing an official standard and then everyone rejoices that finally someone has told them how to write the language they already write in? How is it any different from the myriad of 'rules' made up by well-intentioned people through history, many of which are now responsible for English's lack of well defined spelling rules? In the end such a body would wind up either as descriptive, which is interesting academically but also useless from a standardization perspective, or prescriptive, which would just lead to it being happily ignored.

mmmBacon 6y ago

I love that English is messy. The messiness is what gives richness and new words and allows for richness and diversity of expression. There are some people who are truly masterful with their choices of words and word ordering. If English had a central authority, I’d imagine that we’d have missed out on numerous great works.

biztos 6y ago

I'm surprised I didn't see more native German speakers refute this. First, German is not standardized, and the attempts to (re-)standardize it are, let's say, controversial.[0] Even within Germany there are vast differences within the spoken language, mostly but not exclusively by region. The written language is more uniform but that's also a bit contested. I'm not a linguist but I'd guess the differences are at least as strong as in different parts of the UK. For example in Berlin you would have the advantage that a native speaker of any form of German can pretty much understand the natives when they talk amongst themselves. You would not have that luxury in Swabia. Second, the idea that this presumed standard crosses borders is... well sorry but it's absurd. Ask any Austrian or Swiss-German. Or even read their newspapers. And finally, English is rapidly creeping into unofficial-but-official German. For example they routinely say "Vaccine" in the news instead of "Impfstoff" now. I could go on but I guess it's off topic. German is a living language, and an international one, and as much as Duden might have been a guiding light to my generation it's not that for the kids at all. [0]: (in German) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschreibung_von_1996 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_der_deutschen_Rechtschr...

danans 6y ago

> That way we'd make 10% of English speaker's lives much better... Which 10% is that?