The need for government intervention

The problem

As soon as I speak with someone from England, I know their social background and they know mine, immediately.

It would be better if everyone learned to speak with a standard accent at school, like Latin was learned in the old days, especially in this time of mass immigration. This would avoid class and incomer division while improving comprehension and social cohesion. After all a language is meant for communication and is not something that develops spontaneously.

The thing is that English is written in a very misleading way as regards pronunciation. For the non-native speaker, something written in French can be read out with little difficulty but something written in English can not. But there is a solution: use phonetic text to learn accurate pronunciation at school. If you know the sounds of English not only implicitly (as most people do) but also explicitly (as those who are familiar with phonetics do), you can read a phonetic text in any register or accent of English without difficulty, cockney, middle-class, American, whatever.

A language is an artificial thing imposed by authority. One hundred years ago, only a minority of those living in France spoke French. And the same applied to German and Italian.  The Occitan language, which was never really unified as it did not have a national sponsor, was spoken at the time everywhere in France south of the River Loire down to the Mediterranean Coast and reached out east and west into Northern Italy and beyond the Pyrenees Mountains into Catalonia. In fact some say that the South of France, Spain and Italy formed a unified cultural block. Anyway, the French national education system was given the task of eliminating all "dialects". It was massively successful.

The elimination of Occitan is described here in Wikipedia. In Occitan this is called La Vergonha, which means “shame”, and refers to the effects of various policies of the government of France on its minorities whose native language was deemed a patois, where a Romance language spoken in the country other than Standard French, such as Occitan or the languages d'oïl, as well as other non-Romance languages such as Alsatian and Basque, were suppressed.

Meanwhile in Academia, wokeness is pulling in the opposite direction to unification. Here is an example of the view of an eminent English phonetician: you should not correct people’s mistakes. The trouble is that while this may avoid hurting the feelings of the corrected (unlikely in my view, I personally am always grateful) but it has an number of bad aspects: it dislocates and invalidates the English language and degrades it as a means of communication (but maybe that is the unspoken motivation).

English is a precious resource for the whole world and needs to be fostered by the English.

Centrifugal and Centripetal

In physics, centrifugal force is an apparent force felt in a curved path of travel (as when a car takes a bend), and centripetal force is the force that keeps the path curved. If you whirl an object round your head on a string, it is the force you have to exert to keep it turning (if you let go of the string the object flies away in a straight line).

In human affairs, there are what can be seen as similar forces. Humans form groups, and these groups are in competition.

What increases group cohesion can be called centripetal. What decreases group cohesion can be called centrifugal. Successful groups have strong centripetal forces and resist centrifugal forces.

In competition between groups, each seeks to make its members proud and optimistic and to demoralize and dishearten the members of the other groups.

One of the things that strongly binds a group together is a common language. The English language is one of the main things that makes England unified. For some reason, Academia in England has set itself the task of invalidating the English language. A lot more could be said about this but is seems that the individuals involved are acting in the interests of some powerful enemy, wittingly or unwittingly.

Standardisation

Language only works because it is standardised.

Latin was a standardised, but when Rome fell in the fifth century, it began to degenerate. What we have now are French, Spanish, and Italian, and far behind many little brothers and sisters, like dying Occitan.


Sometimes standardisation can be a good thing, for instance with:

• driving on the same side of the road
• all having a seven-day week, and twenty-four hours in the day
• weights and measures (kilos, pounds, metres, nautical miles etc.)
  
• fits and clearances (every nut in the bag fits every bolt etc.)
  

and in many other instances too.


Standardisation can only be imposed by authority.

The British government needs to standardise English, but seems distracted with short-term issues. It needs to wake up.

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