4 ms·
> (edit: almost forgot we are talking about France, a country which tries to control its language by law. Carry on then!) I get why this is controversial, but
by rospaya 4y ago
> (edit: almost forgot we are talking about France, a country which tries to control its language by law. Carry on then!)
I get why this is controversial, but keep in mind that a lot of countries do that. English is the outlier here, and that's because it's not being threatened the same way other national languages are.
- philistine 4y agoYou're both completely right, and completely wrong. You're completely right that French is far from the only language with a centralized linguistic authority. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators) As a matter of fact, the United States is all in as a language regulator: they have a language regulator ... for Spanish! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Academy_of_the_Spanish_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Academy_of_the_...) Where you are absurdly wrong, is where you say that the threat to a language is the reason for the existence of a language academy. It simply isn't; the reasons are purely historical for almost all languages. I mean, Cardinal Richelieu founded l'académie française. French was not threatened during the reign of Louis XIII!
- herewulf 4y agoFrench may be a bad example but at least some language regulation is actually nice, otherwise you end up with the dumpster fire that is English spelling. I say this as someone teaching two young children to read.