Why the English language doesn't have an academy

Linguistics geeks know that there are official “academies” that issue rules for their languages.

But English is not one of them, unlike its Western European counterparts of Spanish, French, and Italian.

Why is that?

The short answer is, efforts to coordinate one seem to have been cut short by a plague outbreak.

Of course, there’s more to the answer than that; Lapham’s Quarterly takes a look at why the English language doesn’t have an academy.

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