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Comment by oersted | Hacker News Reader

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.

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This is especially important for smaller languages, as otherwise the effect of globalisation means that by-default they would just use the foreign (typically English) word. These institutions are responsible for maintaining the culture of the language.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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