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I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "corr

I feel that most people instinctively assume that some institution, e.g. the government or the dictionary publishers are the authority on what constitutes "correct language". It's important to emphasize that language (included spelling) is something that develops organically and that the role of these institutions is just to capture the status quo. At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
Indeed, dictionaries and governments are just writing down what's already happening in the language. In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.
- duped 2y ago
  That's not always accurate, many of these government bodies fight the evolution of the vernacular and suppress dialects or loanwords.
  - metaphor 2y ago
    This. For example, in the Mariana Islands, there are two independent othography committees that have been low-key duking it out over an indigenous language with less than 50k native speakers; see these brief highlights[1; p. 11 onward] from a recognized scholar of the language for a small sampling. In the CNMI, the language is routinely spoken (i.e. English is a second language in most households) and the CNMI's othography committee has taken a conservative approach, focusing on simple written rules that capture sound as spoken, and biasing its orthography towards serving as an optimal language preservation mechanism...which makes objective sense given its target population is overwhelmingly fluent. In Guam, however, the spoken language was nearing generational extinction largely driven by American colonial influence not dissimilar to the going concern of native Hawaiians. Ironically, Guam's better funded orthography committee has taken a much more liberal approach in establishing new written rules and spellings (e.g. CHamoru is the official spelling of the language/people written into law as of 2017; yes, the letter CH is now entirely capitalized in a proper noun; previously Chamoru, as opposed to the prevailing and historically consistent Chamorro in the CNMI). There's also been a recent resurgence of language adoption by the native youth cohort on Guam largely motivated by grassroots sociopolitical identity movement. This hipster generation has taken it upon themselves to replace an ever growing number of established words adopted during colonial rule hundreds of years ago with all but forgotten words of the ancient tongue...which I suppose is fair game as language evolution goes, but it's gotten to a point of irony where these changes are throwing off the elder native-speaking generation responsible for passing on the language to their progeny, e.g. family (English) --> familia (Spanish adopted) --> manggåfa (antiquated is the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is happening in the CNMI. [1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=11 https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=...
- schroeding 2y ago
  Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g. Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys equivalent to The Daily Mail even had an entire campaign against it with stickers and all. And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography. Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - nobody9999 2y ago
    >And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography. Ich hat das nicht verstanden. Ich kann mit meinem fusse wahlen. Wie konnte ich fur schlecte Deutsch bestraft werden? Ich wohne nicht in Deutschland. Und ja, meinem Deutsch ist sehr schlecht. Das stimmt. Kommen sie damit klar. Edit: Fixed (without really improving) my terrible german.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Nation-states generally tend to be hostile towards dialects historically because they are seen as disruptive to "national unity", and in more extreme cases, as latent separatism. And it feels like, because larger nation-states usually have more history of separatism (having forcibly assimilated more distinct local cultures), they also tend to be more touchy about that.
    - majewsky 2y ago
      As a German, I don't think this applies to Germany all that much. For example, multiple German states have enshrined in their constitutions a specific protection for several minority languages (mostly Germanic languages like Low German or Danish, but also the Slavic language of Sorbian that's native to Brandenburg and Saxony). If anything, the state and county governments are working to preserve those local varieties.
moffkalast 2y ago
Language is power, France is bacon.
sweezyjeezy 2y ago
France has a mechanism to try to stop this: the Académie Française [1] that publishes the official French dictionary. Rather than simply recording language as its used, they do actively try to steer it. They're most well known for trying to suppress anglicisms, e.g. in the early 2000s they pushed 'courriel' instead of 'email'. That one did not work out - email is much more common, and finally entered the dictionary in 2009 (to this day labelled 'anglicism' and discouraged over 'mél'). FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
- BitwiseFool 2y ago
  My absolute favorite example of this is the suppression of "podcast" in favor of the far more romantic "audio à la demande".
- lcouturi 2y ago
  'Courriel' was coined by French Canadian translator André Clas, not by the Académie Française. The Office québécois de la langue française successfully promoted its usage in Quebec in the 90s and the Académie Française unsuccessfully tried to do the same in France. 'Courriel' is still commonly used by French Canadians, but indeed it was never widely adopted by France. As a French Canadian, I usually use 'courriel", though the anglicism 'e-mail' is also quite commonly used. Can't say I've ever seen anyone use 'mél', tho.
  - sweezyjeezy 2y ago
    Yes I don't think they invent words, that really would be bad.
diego_moita 2y ago
Well, communication needs standards. As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or Posix we also need someone to define what is English, Spanish or any language. If you don't believe it then try to understand whatever language a Venezuelan or Dominican speaks. That blabber is anything but Spanish.
- sweezyjeezy 2y ago
  But what are you suggesting? It wouldn't be better if Venezuela had its language dictated by another country (e.g. Spain) - that would just be oppressive.
  - diego_moita 2y ago
    Well, ASALE[1] (Association of Academies of Spanish Language) is already a cross-national body that negotiates these rules among several countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_the_Spanish_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or Posix we also need someone Why? Humans are almost infinitely more adaptable and capable of dynamically changing their behaviour compared to computer programs. Learning to understand/speak a new pseudo dialect of your native language isn't particularly hard. Millions of people do that near effortlessly on a daily basis (especially in many German speaking areas).
oersted 2y ago
This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and are intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions). True they adapt the standard over time following common usage, but the standard is the primary source of truth and many things are decided unilaterally regardless of common usage.
- SSJPython 2y ago
  > This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions). This sounds very similar to the common law vs. civil law traditions as well. I wonder if there's a connection between linguistics and legal systems.
- marcellus23 2y ago
  > This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists It's not unique to English linguists, it's a tenet of modern linguistics in general. A language is defined by the way people actually speak. If that's influenced by a central organization, fine, but that does not contradict descriptivism at all. Someone studying a language should always study the way the language is spoken by real people, using prescriptivist sources as supplementary sources of information where needed.
  - oersted 2y ago
    I don't disagree, it is certainly not unique to English, and these central institutions do largely have a descriptivist attitude (although the French are known to be rather purist ;) ). But there is a practical difference: textbooks and dictionaries in English have traditionally come from distributed institutions, which are eminent but none of them claims to be official, whereas for example in Spanish they all originate from or closely follow the standards of the Real Academia. Sometimes unified standards have been artificially created, like for Basque or Mandarin, and in those cases prescriptivism is more dominant.
criddell 2y ago
Lots of people try to police English as well. It wasn't that long ago whenever any use of "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" would get plenty of reaction from the prescriptivists. Fortunately, that war seems to have ended.
jrootabega 2y ago
Maintaining correctness of language is not inherently a limitation of freedom. You are free to be incorrect in a free society. No one is entitled to respect for being incorrect in a free society. It IS possible to abuse authority over language to exert unfair control, but they are not always the same thing.
BlindEyeHalo 2y ago
If you want to maintain mutual intelligibility of a nation you need a standardised set of rules to teach kids at school. If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.
keiferski 2y ago
I think this is a naive view. Language does not develop “organically,” unless your definition of organic includes media corporations, university boards, and hundreds of other institutions which use their wealth to influence society. The idea that individual speakers of a language just independently start using specific words or phrases (or pushing the ideas behind those words) without any input or influence is simply not true.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago

Indeed, dictionaries and governments are just writing down what's already happening in the language. In a way language is one of the only truly democratic institutions. We all vote for new words and new pronunciations by using them or not using them. The collective action of all these choices is the language.

duped 2y ago
That's not always accurate, many of these government bodies fight the evolution of the vernacular and suppress dialects or loanwords.
- metaphor 2y ago
  This. For example, in the Mariana Islands, there are two independent othography committees that have been low-key duking it out over an indigenous language with less than 50k native speakers; see these brief highlights[1; p. 11 onward] from a recognized scholar of the language for a small sampling. In the CNMI, the language is routinely spoken (i.e. English is a second language in most households) and the CNMI's othography committee has taken a conservative approach, focusing on simple written rules that capture sound as spoken, and biasing its orthography towards serving as an optimal language preservation mechanism...which makes objective sense given its target population is overwhelmingly fluent. In Guam, however, the spoken language was nearing generational extinction largely driven by American colonial influence not dissimilar to the going concern of native Hawaiians. Ironically, Guam's better funded orthography committee has taken a much more liberal approach in establishing new written rules and spellings (e.g. CHamoru is the official spelling of the language/people written into law as of 2017; yes, the letter CH is now entirely capitalized in a proper noun; previously Chamoru, as opposed to the prevailing and historically consistent Chamorro in the CNMI). There's also been a recent resurgence of language adoption by the native youth cohort on Guam largely motivated by grassroots sociopolitical identity movement. This hipster generation has taken it upon themselves to replace an ever growing number of established words adopted during colonial rule hundreds of years ago with all but forgotten words of the ancient tongue...which I suppose is fair game as language evolution goes, but it's gotten to a point of irony where these changes are throwing off the elder native-speaking generation responsible for passing on the language to their progeny, e.g. family (English) --> familia (Spanish adopted) --> manggåfa (antiquated is the new hip). In contrast, no such shift in zeitgeist is happening in the CNMI. [1] https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=11 https://people.ucsc.edu/~schung/orthog_differences.pdf#page=...
schroeding 2y ago
Eh, I wouldn't agree with that. In Germany, we had multiple top-down orthographic reforms in the past (e.g. Rechtschreibreform 1996, had many many significant, brand-new changes to make spelling and speaking more consistent) which were pretty forced, i.e. was not organic at all. I'm not saying it was bad, I like the current state of the German language - but it was not organic or democratic. Germanys equivalent to The Daily Mail even had an entire campaign against it with stickers and all. And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography. Not to mention other sources of non-organic language change, like e.g. suppressing dia- or sociolects, but I also don't want to delve (hehe) too far. :P
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nobody9999 2y ago
  >And there is no true way to "vote with your feet" if you get punished for violating the official orthography. Ich hat das nicht verstanden. Ich kann mit meinem fusse wahlen. Wie konnte ich fur schlecte Deutsch bestraft werden? Ich wohne nicht in Deutschland. Und ja, meinem Deutsch ist sehr schlecht. Das stimmt. Kommen sie damit klar. Edit: Fixed (without really improving) my terrible german.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- int_19h 2y ago
  Nation-states generally tend to be hostile towards dialects historically because they are seen as disruptive to "national unity", and in more extreme cases, as latent separatism. And it feels like, because larger nation-states usually have more history of separatism (having forcibly assimilated more distinct local cultures), they also tend to be more touchy about that.
  - majewsky 2y ago
    As a German, I don't think this applies to Germany all that much. For example, multiple German states have enshrined in their constitutions a specific protection for several minority languages (mostly Germanic languages like Low German or Danish, but also the Slavic language of Sorbian that's native to Brandenburg and Saxony). If anything, the state and county governments are working to preserve those local varieties.

moffkalast 2y ago

Language is power, France is bacon.

sweezyjeezy 2y ago

France has a mechanism to try to stop this: the Académie Française [1] that publishes the official French dictionary. Rather than simply recording language as its used, they do actively try to steer it. They're most well known for trying to suppress anglicisms, e.g. in the early 2000s they pushed 'courriel' instead of 'email'. That one did not work out - email is much more common, and finally entered the dictionary in 2009 (to this day labelled 'anglicism' and discouraged over 'mél'). FWIW the German equivalent is much less prescriptive, it only weighs in on grammar / punctuation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise

BitwiseFool 2y ago
My absolute favorite example of this is the suppression of "podcast" in favor of the far more romantic "audio à la demande".
lcouturi 2y ago
'Courriel' was coined by French Canadian translator André Clas, not by the Académie Française. The Office québécois de la langue française successfully promoted its usage in Quebec in the 90s and the Académie Française unsuccessfully tried to do the same in France. 'Courriel' is still commonly used by French Canadians, but indeed it was never widely adopted by France. As a French Canadian, I usually use 'courriel", though the anglicism 'e-mail' is also quite commonly used. Can't say I've ever seen anyone use 'mél', tho.
- sweezyjeezy 2y ago
  Yes I don't think they invent words, that really would be bad.

diego_moita 2y ago

Well, communication needs standards. As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or Posix we also need someone to define what is English, Spanish or any language. If you don't believe it then try to understand whatever language a Venezuelan or Dominican speaks. That blabber is anything but Spanish.

sweezyjeezy 2y ago
But what are you suggesting? It wouldn't be better if Venezuela had its language dictated by another country (e.g. Spain) - that would just be oppressive.
- diego_moita 2y ago
  Well, ASALE[1] (Association of Academies of Spanish Language) is already a cross-national body that negotiates these rules among several countries. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_the_Spanish_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...
Wytwwww 2y ago
> As much as we need someone to define what is http, TCP/IP or Posix we also need someone Why? Humans are almost infinitely more adaptable and capable of dynamically changing their behaviour compared to computer programs. Learning to understand/speak a new pseudo dialect of your native language isn't particularly hard. Millions of people do that near effortlessly on a daily basis (especially in many German speaking areas).

oersted 2y ago

This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and are intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions). True they adapt the standard over time following common usage, but the standard is the primary source of truth and many things are decided unilaterally regardless of common usage.

SSJPython 2y ago
> This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists, but for many languages (Spanish, French, German…) there is a central institution that does indeed decide what is officially correct. Their decisions are taken seriously and intentionally propagated anywhere where language is used in a somewhat official context (not just in public institutions). This sounds very similar to the common law vs. civil law traditions as well. I wonder if there's a connection between linguistics and legal systems.
marcellus23 2y ago
> This has historically been the philosophy of English linguists It's not unique to English linguists, it's a tenet of modern linguistics in general. A language is defined by the way people actually speak. If that's influenced by a central organization, fine, but that does not contradict descriptivism at all. Someone studying a language should always study the way the language is spoken by real people, using prescriptivist sources as supplementary sources of information where needed.
- oersted 2y ago
  I don't disagree, it is certainly not unique to English, and these central institutions do largely have a descriptivist attitude (although the French are known to be rather purist ;) ). But there is a practical difference: textbooks and dictionaries in English have traditionally come from distributed institutions, which are eminent but none of them claims to be official, whereas for example in Spanish they all originate from or closely follow the standards of the Real Academia. Sometimes unified standards have been artificially created, like for Basque or Mandarin, and in those cases prescriptivism is more dominant.

criddell 2y ago

Lots of people try to police English as well. It wasn't that long ago whenever any use of "begs the question" to mean "raises the question" would get plenty of reaction from the prescriptivists. Fortunately, that war seems to have ended.

jrootabega 2y ago

Maintaining correctness of language is not inherently a limitation of freedom. You are free to be incorrect in a free society. No one is entitled to respect for being incorrect in a free society. It IS possible to abuse authority over language to exert unfair control, but they are not always the same thing.

BlindEyeHalo 2y ago

If you want to maintain mutual intelligibility of a nation you need a standardised set of rules to teach kids at school. If you just let it "develop organically" without any governing body you get a wide range of dialects that will drift further apart from another and it will be very difficult to read any text that is 50 years old.

keiferski 2y ago

I think this is a naive view. Language does not develop “organically,” unless your definition of organic includes media corporations, university boards, and hundreds of other institutions which use their wealth to influence society. The idea that individual speakers of a language just independently start using specific words or phrases (or pushing the ideas behind those words) without any input or influence is simply not true.