A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dictatorship, either. Despite the efforts toward "central planning," language {especially its everyday spoken form} stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way.
( James C. Scott )
[ Seeing Like a State: How ]
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