Odair wrote:There is a driving force that has caused us to have big national languanges, instead of a continuum of dialects. That is the effort of the majority of the population to (albeit imperfectly) conform their speech patterns to one prestige variant.
Sorry, you're wrong there. Many features of the English language are converging on patterns that were never imposed.
The majority have never accepted the Latin-derived proscription against ending sentences with prepositions, and have instead retained the Germanic pattern where there's a very blurred line between preposition and adverbs.
The zero-conjunction, much derided by the prescriptivists, is the preferred option of the vast majority of native speakers.
"Whom" is mostly commonly used in modern media as a means to mark someone out as a posh, snobby and/or pretentious.
When I was at primary school, we weren't allowed to write in contractions -- no "can't do , won't do, hasn't done" etc. And yet outside of academia, pretty much everyone happily uses them in speaking and writing.
Hell, the very fact that prescriptivists keep complaining about "common errors" is direct proof that the prescriptivists are in the minority about a hell of a lot of things.
We're perfectly capable of reaching consensus through use and don't need a structure imposed from self-appointed authorities.