I’m not clear why French is not a great example. The government body mitigating change was the point I was making.
The question isn’t whether drift is happening, it’s whether that’s good or useful. Modeling new concepts is important, but adding pointless, sloppy ambiguity isn’t “evolution” by any reasonable definition. Try it in an professional, academic, or legal context. This article isn’t that, obviously, but do we want to end up like high and low German, with a formal and informal language variant? Are we already there?
That was (re-)established for the purposes of “d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser la langue française” “to annihilate the patois and to universalize the use of the French language”. Which is not good or useful.
Using the word evolution does not evoke the steady ordered progression you seem to think it does. Evolution is all about sloppy pointless meandering, if it isn’t advantageous it might eventually go extinct, but there’s loads of things we’ve evolved as a species which aren’t ideal, and sometimes detrimental. Evolution isn’t some curator, it’s a biological process with countless inputs and is many things, but not ordered.
In a very real sense, we are already there. Latinate words for the high fallutin’, Germanic for the unwashed masses. Part of why English has so many words that have the same (essential) meaning. Red vs. Erythematous, for instance. Swollen vs. Edemetous. Yeah, i favor medical terms, but any of our law dogs can give much better examples.
There’s a difference between word origins and grammar I think, though. Do you pluralize platypus as “platypodes” is a pretty different question from “do double negatives cancel out” (yes for English, no for French), or if there is a royal order of adjectives (yes), or how set negation works: “all paper isn’t white” means there isn’t any white paper, while “not all paper is white” means some paper isn’t white.
This article isn’t that, obviously, but do we want to end up like high and low German, with a formal and informal language variant? Are we already there?
and for that, I will stand by my answer. We truly do have parallel languages in English, although not as “formal” high and low, but serve that purpose functionally.
There are multiple ways to distinguish high and low variants of English, on multiple axes. There’s by accent (Stephen Fry speaks a high prestige accent, Michael Caine usually speaks a canonically low prestige one, and in The Kingsman he code switches as a pivotal moment to great effect).
There’s by vocabulary: a larger, more technical and latinate vocabulary is typically higher prestige than if I use short words and simple grammar. There’s a reason why people hypercorrect “whom” when they’re trying to sound “fancy”: they don’t know how to use the dative relative pronoun, but they know that people what talk proper do. (Spoiler alert: these days they mostly don’t either. “whom” is becoming as moribund as “wherefore”. Language changes: deal with it.)
Besides, African American Vernacular English is, it can reasonably argued, already a diverging language. There are grammatical features of AAVE which simply aren’t in other varieties of English. And that’s not even counting varieties with their own quirks: “He does be taking a shower when he’s after running.” is grammatical and correct… in Hiberno-English.
ALSO: High and Low German don’t refer to prestige levels or formality, but geography. High German originates in the highlands and inland regions of the greater Germania region, Low German in the lowlands and coast. Any association of Deutsch as higher prestige than Dutch came later as a result of political power and circumstance.
