At least that should be the case in free societies. Language is power - and controlling it is an important aspect of exercising control.
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.
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=...
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
(But the reason was people thinking it's a "Bildungshindernis", a roadblock in the pursuit of knowledge, like if people speaking dialect were mentally challenged - not national unity)
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.
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
'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.
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.
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.
For example in Lithuanian, an "influencer" is colloquially called "influenceris". But in Lithuanian "influence" translates to "įtakos", so it isn't anywhere close to correct.
The terms "įtakdarys" (influence maker) or "nuomonės formuotojas" (opinion shaper) would be a more Lithuanian version, as they are based on existing Lithuanian words. However in this case "influenceris" rolls off the tounge a lot easier, so maybe it is acceptable to be used.
The purpose of these institutes is to decide which is the correct word to use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Academies_of_th...
France is bacon.