Should Languages be immutable?
Long story short: no, they shouldn’t!
As for the long story, anyone who is — at least — into linguistics knows that a language is a living thing. It deviates throughout time and space, having local, historical and demographic variations. For instance two different individuals, one from America and the other from Great Britain, will surely have contrasting accents and a divergency in vocabulary. Also it can be argued that the pre-industrial british accent was — most likely — “americanized” as pointed out by Mental Floss. Similarly, a fun fact is that English used to sound more like French before the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between the 14th and 18th centuries beginning in southern England because of reasons that are still under debate today.
Although not everyone has, nor ought to have, any knowledge of linguistics or how languages form and evolve, some people out of prejudice, or just straight up ignorance, can’t conceive formal changes to a language in order to normalize or facilitate its use. I know that some, if not most, of those people are just part of an elite resentful of the achievements of the lower-classes and their integration into society — or, at the very least, that’s how they portray themselves when acting like bunch of spoiled brats. Still I’ll try to illuminate them.
Changes are formally made to languages not just to reflect shifts that have already made its way into the speech and spelling without proper standardization, but also to spread literacy, as was the case with the development and implementation of Hangul during the Joseon Dynasty in the later Korean Empire.
Going back to English, another example of change is the disappearance of the pronouns ye, thou, thee, thy and thine over the course of the 16th century. If you speak Portuguese, imagine how amazing it’d be if the second person pronouns were officially dropped out of the language: we wouldn’t need to deal with “Tu és”, “Vós Sois” — hell I needed to look up the “Vós” conjugation in the dictionary. Why the hell have those pronouns not been dropped officially yet? No one uses those pesky words anymore. — They’d be history, we’d only study them in literature classes.
This story was supposed to be more of a rant time so I’m not going to dive any deeper into any of the subjects discussed. I wrote this because of a argument I’ve witnessed in the comment section of a facebook post about the latest Portuguese Language Spelling Reform(“Reforma Ortográfica da Língua Portuguesa”) thus I hope this was enough to get my point across.
