The Proper English Should Be Proper?

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English is a language spoken by millions of people around the world. According to the Ethnologue, a comprehensive reference for the languages around the world, native speakers alone number over 335 million (Lewis). This is of course excluding all the second-language speakers of English around the world. Yet, despite this, English is the only language in the top 5 largest languages which has no official body, and one of only 2 in the top ten, the other being Lahnda spoken in Pakistan (Lewis). In case the reader is unaware to what I 'm referring to, an official body is an official organization that has the authority to say what a language is, and often what it should be. These bodies are called Language Regulators and determine what is proper or standard and what isn 't. This absence of an official body in English doesn 't mean that …show more content…

If an official body were charged with regulating the entire English language, then no. There are many major problems in such an endeavor. The first would arise quickly as negotiations were going on: Which “proper” English should be “proper?” As demonstrated above, there is no one singular “proper English.” At the very least there are two, what we in America call “proper English,” which is associated with the General American or TV accent, and what the British call “Received Pronunciation.” Most ideas of what is standard revolve around one of these two standards. Assuming that Americans and British people could agree on which should be right (a major assumption), there 's still the age old question of why one of these two should be favored over any of the other dozens of accents found throughout the world. A popular idea among linguists is any use of a language is acceptable as long as it clearly communicates the idea to the receiver. While having a monolithic language can help with this, in some ways it can

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