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There is no reason a living language can't be a fossilized relic. French has the fairly conservative French Academy. The German case system as you would learn i
by seabird 4y ago
There is no reason a living language can't be a fossilized relic. French has the fairly conservative French Academy. The German case system as you would learn it from a textbook has been kept on life support by academics and formal users for centuries.
- Macha 4y agoFrench is centralized, but not stationary. It's also, at least among languages I'm familar with, an outlier in being so formally standardised - if English was treated as stringently, variations like Hiberno-English, American English or English as spoken in India would be considered errors, rather than regional variations. Finally, it's not hoping for adoption among a group 40x larger than it's current speaker base.